Steven the hacker, to be found at the blog, Steven's Android Apps, has successfully ported Google's Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS over to Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet.
Support for WiFi, audio, accelerometer and light sensors is still missing along with, seemingly, elements of hardware optimisation/acceleration, however, this port is massively significant if one considers that the Kindle Fire retails in the US for only $200 (£150 - £200). Currently Amazon actually makes a small loss on each sale of the Kindle Fire, hoping to recuperate costs and turn a profit through book and app sales; this means that a relatively high-spec. tablet device with a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, PowerVR SGX540 GPU, 512MB RAM and an IPS panel display, is available at less than cost for purchase.
Until now, the Kindle Fire's exceptionally low costing has naturally been hampered by a highly customised Android 2.3 release, designed to keep users fixed to Amazon's Appstore, preventing the device from being used in any overly flexible manner. Now that Android 4.0 has landed and as the release becomes increasingly stable, users will have a new reason to buy the Kindle Fire. No doubt sales of the tablet will rise from this announcement, though, with Amazon making a loss on each tablet sold that doesn't keep to its original firmware, we wonder exactly what the e-tailer's response to the situation will be.
For the interested, below is a brief video of Android 4.0 running on the Kindle Fire.
