Remember when those $200 tablets looked to be a great deal? Well, it seems that both Amazon and Barnes & Noble are doing all they can to lessen the attractiveness of their respective tablets, with the help of updated firmware. Amazon recently forced an update through (isn’t that nice?) to all Kindle Fire tablets that disabled the ability to root the device. B&N released a similar update that disables the side-loading of non-B&N market apps.
Being in Canada, I don’t have an option of purchasing either of these tablets at this point in time, but given the chance, I would have. With these advancements, I wouldn’t. Both of these tablets looked like an excellent way to get a capable tablet on the cheap, and with the ability to side-load your own applications (such as Android Market), you could do a lot more than just read books and use the limited selection of apps available.
On the Barnes & Nobel side, there’s an app store on the device that includes about 2,000 hand-picked apps, a lot of which cost more than what they would on the real marketplace. I don’t have a major problem with this, as different supermarkets can charge whatever they want for various products, too. But to remove the ability to side-load totally negates one of the major bullet-points that the device shipped with. This should have been a flexible tablet, but it is no longer.
These decisions by Amazon and Barnes & Nobel are likely to hurt sales, because if anyone wants a truly capable Android tablet, these aren’t it. Instead, the ASUS Transformer Prime looks to be the best possible option. It might cost up to 2.5x as much as these, but it’s far more capable and is totally open to side-loading.
On the B&N side, this is kind of upsetting, as this company is the first to really combat Microsoft in its patent cases affecting Android. It’s strange that in one breath, the company accuses Microsoft of using nonsense patents to battle Android and then in another removes functionality on its own tablet that many people bought it for.