Apple’s wildly popular iPad and iPad mini will no doubt be a favorite this Black Friday and beyond, but Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD may also be poised for mass market success.
According to Jefferies & Co.’s analyst Brian Pitz, the “HD” model of the tablet is currently the best-selling item in all of Amazon’s markets around the world.
“The new Kindle Paperwhite and the $69 Kindle are rounding up the Top 3 best-seller list. Unlike last year, each is available for sale in Europe and Japan too,” Pitz explained in an industry note obtained by Forbes.
“With the most economical wireless / 4G plan, better specs than the [Apple] iPad mini and expanding ecosystem, Kindle Fire HD has become a more compelling choice at a very attractive TCO ($549 year 1 total cost vs. $789 for iPad mini and $959 for iPad 3).”
As we’ve previously discussed on TG Daily, Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD lineup runs a heavily modified version of Android with a locked bootloader.
Nevertheless, modders have already rooted various iterations of the tablet, installed Google Play Store and even formulated a method for backing up and restoring system software – without having to perform a custom recovery.
And now custom recovery is in the works for the Kindle Fire HD, courtesy of Hashcode at XDA Developers. Full Safestrap details can be found here on the original forum thread, with a package available for download expected shortly.
According to Hashcode, the current delay is due to a bug that occurs during the entry to recovery.
“What happens is the old init process is somehow still lingering long enough to trigger the ‘omap watchdog’ driver in the kernel. it’s a driver designed to reset the device when the process thinks it’s hung up,” he confirmed on November 8.
“Turns out we killed the old init process off on purpose, so that we can re-start it with new rootfs files. But, that doesn’t change the fact that recovery reboots about 20 seconds after you enter… I’m tinkering with various solutions atm.”
