14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon currently offers the Fire HD 6 and Fire HD 7 tablets as part of its lineup of affordable slates. The devices run a custom version of Android, called Sangria OS, and are limited to offering access to the Amazon Appstore, but no Google Play Store.
Even so, there’s hope for those who own one of these tablets and still crave to be able to tap into the goodness of fully-fledged Android.
Given that, at their core, these tablets are Android devices, there’s no reason why users shouldn’t be able to unlock the bootloader and install a custom recovery. And with the help of xda-developer forum member jimz, that’s now possible.
However, the process of unlocking the bootloader isn’t exactly super easy, so if you don’t have any experience in tweaking Android devices, you’d better leave this task to the advanced users.
Pre-requisites for unlocking your bootloader
In order to get started, you’ll need to have an Android SDK installed on your computer and ADB set up. Once this is done and out of the way, you will have to install TWRP or another custom recovery solution. This is needed for you to root your device.
Luckily, jimz has posted a step-by-step guide that should help you in your quest.
These days, a lot of affordable Android tablets are being offered on the market, so it can be stated that the Fire tablets’ main advantage is the tight integration with Amazon. Still, if you really, really crave for access to Google Play Store, you will need to root your Fire tablet first.
The two slates offer lower-range specs, with both of them taking advantage of a 1280 x 800 pixel resolution display and a 1.5GHz quad-core processor fitted with either 8GB or 16GB of internal storage.
The 7-inch model is a little better than the 6-incher, bundling stereo speakers as opposed to mono speakers in the smaller version.
But given that these tablets rely on MediaTek chips, it might be a while before we will see custom ROMs for them be made available. The thing is developers haven’t had much success working with these chipsets, so far at least.