You wanted an Android tablet for Christmas… and you got one! Alas, it’s a Kindle Fire. Whoops! While the Fire is technically well within the realm of “Android tablet” (and a mighty fine tablet, for the price), it’s not quite the tried-and-true vanilla Android experience you were looking for.
Wait! Don’t go requesting that return label just yet: if a gang of goodhearted hackers have their way, Amazon’s wonderfully wallet-friendly tablet will be running the latest builds of straight-up Android (as in Ice Cream Sandwich) before too long. In fact, they’ve (sort of) already got it working.
Check out the video below, as shot by the fine folks at Lilliputing:
The guys behind this hack (the XDA dev thread can be found here) call it “pre-alpha”, and for good reason. While it technically works, it’s probably not something you want to dabble with just yet. It’s got all sorts of nasty bugs, with the biggest drawbacks being that audio/video playback are pretty much 100% broken.
With that said, few communities can hobble together rock-solid hacks as fast as the Android crowd can. Now that the concept is proven, expect this one to come together quick.