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Comment by borkabrak | Hacker News Reader

Ouch. This one landed. If this is true, then I think it would turn me off the deal. Unless I wanted to try what someone else mentioned and flash it with CyanogenMod or something. Never done that before, but this might be a good way to start..

edit: It looks like they've got the same situation vis-a-vis ads as all Kindles - yes they have ads, there is some attempt to make them unobtrusive, and they only have ads in the US.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/all-kindle-fire-hd-models-ad-su...

So that explains that. Now to find out how hard flashing a new OS would be. :)

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If you've never done rooting/flashing before, an Amazon device is not a good place to start. I did it on a HDX 7 only after a ton of reading, and the consensus is that it's easy to get it wrong and brick the device. There are no escape hatches like there are on the Google Nexus devices. I've done this a ton on my Nexus 5 and my HD2 several years prior.

Also note that the HD 6 and HD 7 are still not flashable, and they've been out for some time. Amazon seems to have gone out of their way to make this a difficult device to tinker on.

My recommendation is to find a well-treated used Nexus 7 and you will have a much better time of things. They are much easier to flash with better ROM support. Please don't buy this thing with the expectation of enjoying some weekend tinkering - it's not worth your time.

(I suppose I'll caveat that the one scenario where it would make sense to get it now would be that v1 firmwares contain bugs that will make your life easier when exploits are found, but still - probably not worth it)

They (Kindle Paperwhite or Fire) only show ads if you are physically in the US? Or if you buy one from Amazon's US site? (Genuinely curious here.)

Just ads on lockscreen...not too bad.

Ads on the lockscreen may be fine from a UX perspective, however, that tablet is now using data when it's a sleep which becomes a factor when someone is on a capped connection. Sure, it may only be a handful of MB/month, but to some people, every MB counts.

I believe this thing only has wifi, so that's not a relevant problem.

This might come as news, but wifi data is still data and counts towards the data cap.

Its not some free magical data flying around on its own.

In what third-world country do you have to live for your home DSL (or fiber or whatever) to have a data cap? Even back in the olden days of dial-up that would be laughable on the face of it.

Can you turn off the lockscreen?

Don't think 'lock' think 'swipe over to make sure this isn't a pocket dial' screen.

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