Thursday, 22 December 2011 12:13
Nook and Fire “upgraded” with reduced functions
Written by Nick Farell
Jailbreakers locked up again
Ebook sellers Amazon and Barnes and Noble have worked out a way of locking up jailbroken Kindle Fires and Nooks.
Yesterday Amazon was rolled out the Kindle Fire 6.2.1 update which killed of root access, to prevent people jailbreaking them. Barnes and Noble swiftly followed suit making it impossible for side-loading apps from stores other than the official Barnes and Noble app store.
This is all a little annoying because the Fire update that Amazon promised last week was important because it improved performance of the Silk browser and allow you to customize the carousel of 'recently used things' that dominates the Fire's homescreen. It was also supposed to password protect Wi-Fi access. All useful stuff only if the Fire is rooted, the update will unroot it, at least until the hackers work out how re-root it. Given that Christmas is here we would have thought the hackers would be a bit busy.
The Nook is supposed to provide minor enhancements based on early customer feedback. All these seem to be is removing root access and the ability to sideload apps from Android Market and Amazon's Appstore. We can't think which customer asked for this but someone should have taken him out and roughed him up a bit.
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