Users will have to install a custom ROM on the tablet

Dec 4, 2014 07:20 GMT  ·  By

Android 5.0 Lollipop rolled out into the wild not so long ago, but you won’t see it on many tablets. The Nexus slates and the NVIDIA Shield Tablet are some of its first beneficiaries and other models will probably be slowly updated to Google’s latest build too.

But if you have the original Amazon Kindle laying around the house (yes, the one that got launched back in 2011), you should know that you have the chance of getting a taste of Lollipop 5.0 way ahead of others.

The original Amazon Kindle is quite a relic today

Sure, the tablet is quite outdated compared to today’s standards. After all, it has 1024 x 600 pixel resolution on a 7-inch display, a TI OMAP 4430 dual-core processor 512MB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage.

Even with these rudimentary specifications, the tablet is not dead, as Amazon still continues to release firmware updates for the slate, even if the latest Fire OS 4 wasn't ported to the device.

On the other hand, some independent developers have taken a liking to the original Kindle Fire table ever since its release, so there’s plenty of custom ROMs in the wild available for the tablet. And the good news is that, now you can even run Android 5.0 Lollipop on the tablet, unofficially of course.

But installing Android 5.0 Lollipop on your “ancient” Kindle tablet will take a little bit of work and you’ll need to follow a few steps to be able to get it onboard.

How to get Android 5.0 Lollipop to work on your old Kindle slate

1) You will need to check whether your Kindle Fire is running firmware version 6.3.3. If this is the case, you will need to check out this tutorial on the xda-developers forum that will allow you to root the tablet and flash custom ROMs, bootloaders and recoveries.

2) Remember that the Kindle Fire does not normally offer access to Google Play, which is replaced by the Amazon Appstore and other Amazon software. You will need to replace this even if you’re running a custom ROM on your tablet, and in order to do so, you will need you follow Hashcode’s Project OtterX’s path.

3) Last but not least, you’ll move on to install Haschode’s build of CyanogenMod 12 which is based on Android 5.0 Lollipop.

This won’t definitely be the only custom ROM based on Android 5.0 we will end up seeing, but since Hashcode has been working on developing stuff for the Kindle Fire for some time now, we’re in safe hands.

Even so, the CyanogenMod 12 for the Kindle tablet is in alpha version, so you might still encounter a few bugs. For example, you’ll probably notice that battery life isn't all that great and the transparency effects have been disabled due to way too little RAM.

Regardless of these little drawbacks, if you have an original Kindle Fire tablet gathering dust around the house, it might be time to pull it out and have a little fun with it. Just because you can.

Original Amazon Kindle Fire Gets Lollipop(s) (7 Images)

The original Kindle Fire tablet
Original Kindle Fire with Android 5.0 LollipopOriginal Kindle Fire options
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