Amazon’s a pretty canny company. Sure, 99% of users who buy a Kindle Fire won’t do anything but buy books on it, but that 1% that don’t want the UI? Amazon expects you to root the unit, and quickly.
PC Magazine got an on the record quote from Jon Jenkins, director of Amazon’s Silk browser. He told them that Amazon pretty much expects the Fire to be rooted at some point.
It’s going to get rooted, and what you do after you root it is up to you”
This doesn’t mean that Amazon’s going straight down the HTC-style unlocked bootloader path, however; it’s noted in the article that Jenkins didn’t know if the bootloader was locked or not, just that the company wouldn’t actively do anything to stop the rooting community. [PCMag]
antghomy
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 11:35 AMThe quote sounds kinda rude.
Cameron
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 11:35 AM“It’s going to get rooted, and what you do after you root it is up to you”
How suggestive…..
SkinHead
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 12:09 PMHaw Haw – Its funny cause its rude
James
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 12:09 PMIt’s important to note that Americans do not use the word “root” as we do here in Australia.
james
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 12:58 PMit’s always awkward when my american friends tell me that they are rooting for me.
Matt
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 1:08 PMWhat are you talking about? To “root for” something is a common expression in Australia as well, it’s not an American thing.
Just This Guy ...
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 1:39 PMSay to almost ANY ‘stralian that your device is rooted and I can pretty much guarantee either a blank look (because they think you’ve broken it and they should care), or childish sniggering.
The term is simply not as prevalent here in Oz, so no, it’s NOT that common here.
Also I’ve never heard anyone here say they’re rooting for someone outside of Victoria maybe.
Adam
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 2:19 PMYeah, we don’t root for people down here in tassie either.
Matt
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 5:29 PMI never said anything about the usage of “root” in this article (i.e. devices being rooted), and yes, that *is* uncommon in Australia — but to be fair, it’s not particularly common in America either. In fact, it’s really only common in computing circles.
You’re wrong about the other one though — “root for” is definitely fairly common here — perhaps not so much rooting for people, but plenty of people say they root for a sports team.
Luke
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 1:45 PMNo, it’s not. We just understanding it when we hear it because so much of our movies and TV are imported.
Beaphy
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 12:55 PMI love the fact that Amazon is so much more than just a book supplier. I thought, even long before Silk, that their cloud services and processing are incredible. A great business model!
Jo
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 2:07 PMI’ve always taken the term as to mean “it’s stuffed”, so definitely not used the same way as it is in the USA.
TSH
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 2:17 PMGood to know that they aren’t afraid of people using their hardware in ways they haven’t intended.
“hey, we don’t care so long as you’ve paid for the hardware and you pay for using the services we supply”
… and why should they? It’s good sense to not be antagonistic to the geek crowd.
poltak
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 2:20 PMThe term “root” goes all the way back to your old UNIX systems where “root” was the name of the user who had all rights and permissions for files and programs in the system. It was called root, I think, because the root (or superuser) had access to the root directory (or just ‘/’)~ similar to C:\ in NT.
And of course, Android uses a modified Linux kernel which, being a UNIX-like system, also uses the term “root” for its administrator or superuser. Hence the term “root” in the context of Android (you are becoming the “root” user by rooting your phone/tablet).
The end.
DK Son
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 5:26 PMFinally… a company that is like “meh, haxors will be haxors. why invest time and money into preventing it when we can just sell a heap of them?”
Pretty good I say, and given it is just a kindle there shouldn’t be any big honky dory security on its “OS” anyway.
Aliasalpha
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 6:45 PMHmm, impressively non-dictatorial, I’m pleasantly surprised.
Steve
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 7:54 PMIt’s nice to see a company out there that doesn’t want to police what you can or can’t do on the device you paid for.
Ollie
Friday, September 30, 2011 at 8:02 AMI think that’s the whole point behind their marketing, why charge a bazillion dollars, when you can say, here’s a cheap device that you know, you can do WHATEVER THE HELL YOU WANT WITH. Bingo, sell 10x more, because of price and convenience.
Saying that, I’ll probably buy one too. In fact, I might even buy one for the wife as well.