
Cheaper Than A Tablet: 'Rooting' Your E-Reader - jnazario
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/27/134897271/cheaper-than-a-tablet-rooting-your-e-reader
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Abomonog
I first rooted mine back in January. It's a very easy device to root and you
have a lot of options on how to do it now. You can run off an SD card of you
still want to use it as a nook sometimes (like getting your free hour at B&N.)

You can run Froyo, Cyanogen, or a Honeycomb version. And it's very hard if not
impossible to brick.

If you are serious about wanting to root yours, I'd suggest putting Cyanogen
on your EMMC, with it overclocked to 1.1. Very easy to do now that you can
download ClockworkMod on an SD card and install Cyanogen, or anything else for
that matter using it.

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nextparadigms
If you don't already own one of these, you might as well wait for the rumored
Google Nexus tablet:

[http://androidandme.com/2012/03/opinions/rumor-nexus-
tablet-...](http://androidandme.com/2012/03/opinions/rumor-nexus-tablet-is-a-
done-deal-to-retail-for-as-low-as-149/)

~~~
webwanderings
They can sell these for free and they'd still be profitable because Android is
nothing but a market where they're selling Ads and Software to large number of
potential eyeballs and pockets willing to shell out few bucks here and there.

~~~
webwanderings
Down-votes without a comment?

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tmcw
Correct me if I'm wrong (I'd like to be), but the actual pictured tablet, the
'Kindle keyboard' actually doesn't have a notable rooting technique, and the
caption below it is wrong?

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eof
It has an easy rooting technique.

Some useful things you can do are 'desponsor' your ad supported kindle, add
some useful navigation techniques (like user defined alt+character
combinations to do common things or input characters you need), tether your 3g
kindle via usb.

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herval
By tether, do you mean I could use my kindle as a 3g "modem"? Wouldn't that go
against the device's terms of the device? Do you know of anyone that did it?

~~~
eof
Yes, yes, yes

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herval
the outstanding question was: do you know of Amazon blocking/banning anyone
for that?

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eof
i haven't been following it closely at all. the direct answer is 'no' i don't.
but that doesn't mean they haven't.

the main kindle rooting community i know of was not giving specific
instructions on how to tether or disable the ads so presumably that helped
limit how much of a problem it was for amazon.

but no, i haven't heard of any kindles being shut down for any reason

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pragmatic
Kindle Fire?

$200 android tablet with decent web browsing.

One drawback, no Google Android Market err umm Google Play market unless your
root it.

One of my five year old's favorite toys...I get it back after he's asleep.

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michaelbuckbee
This was my thought as well, if nothing else it is $60 cheaper than the Nook
Color.

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pasbesoin
My older generation Kobo would be much more useful to me if it would simply do
ePub in landscape, so that code samples within texts did not extent past the
right margin with no means to scroll. Or if they could be made to wrap, ugly
as that might look.

Supposedly, the firmware that the Kobo firmware is based on, does this, and
some have successfully supplanted the latter with the former.

Take this along with the long-anticipated, now increasingly manifesting -- or
publicized -- security failures of various "closed garden" phone/tablet
environments, and I am increasingly disinclined to use, depend on, or support
any such environment that is _not_ open source and therefore amenable to some
very common-sense functionality, by the community if and when the manufacture
lets us down.

P.S. The Kobo firmware is at heart more or less Linux (although based on an
intermediate party's customization of same). I'm frustrated at some things
that Kobo has failed to offer, but at least there are ways past this (that
don't even involve "jailbreaking", in its more legalesque meaning).

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webwanderings
I don't know if there's anything innovative here. Why should I bother going
through such trouble for $190-250 range hacked tablet when I could buy (and
just did the other day) Lenovo's A1 for $175.

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wtallis
Because the IdeaPad A1 uses a TN panel, but the Nook Color uses an IPS panel.
And if you want to compare against the Nook Tablet ($250), then it's still got
a better screen, and also has more RAM, a dual-core CPU, and a faster GPU.

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webwanderings
Well, for my taste, all these tablets are e-Readers and game devices only.
There's hardly anything you can do on them that would count as serious,
contrasting the cost of these things.

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Kuiper
It's worth noting that this story is a year old and the price figures and
remarks about Kindle's lack of touch screen are a tad obsolete; a Kindle
Keyboard with 3G is only $140 if you get a "sponsored" version (and removing
the ads is trivially easy when you jailbreak), and for $150 you can get the
Kindle Touch with 3G.

