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This week a lot of folks have been unwrapping Amazon Fire tablets, setting them up… and figuring out that some of the apps and games you want to run on them aren't available out of the box.

Fortunately there are a bunch of ways to make an Amazon tablet more useful. You can sideload applications that aren't available in the Amazon Appstore. Or you can even install the Google Play Store and add a custom launcher application to make an Amazon tablet feel more like a standard Android tablet… even though it's running Amazon's fork of Android called FireOS.

In today's tech news roundup, I've got links to some of the articles we've published over the past few years that describe how to hack an Amazon Fire tablet. And in more recent tech news, the latest release of the postmarketOS mobile Linux distribution brings camera support to some phones that originally shipped with Android, AOOSTAR has a new mini PC with discrete graphics, JSAUX has a new dock for handheld gaming PCs that includes built-in cooling fans, and there's a new Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W-powered color E Ink display kit.

Amazon Fire Tablet hacking roundup

Amazon's Fire line of tablets are some of the cheapest Android-based tablets that are worth buying. The Fire HD 8, Fire HD 10, and Fire Max 11 have decent displays, affordable price tags, reasonably good battery life, and performance that's more than good enough for reading eBooks, streaming videos, surfing the web, or even light gaming.

But while the tablets run an operating system that's based on Android, Amazon's FireOS is different in a few important ways. It has a custom user interface designed by Amazon that puts the company's apps and services front and center. And it ships with the Amazon Appstore instead of the Google Play Store. Not only are fewer apps and games available in Amazon's store, but if you already paid for an app or service on your Android phone, you'd have to pay again to get it from Amazon… unless you install the Google Play Store yourself. Because an open secret about Amazon's tablets is that it's possible to install Google's app store on them. Keep in mind that there might be some compatibility issues – not all apps distributed in the Play Store will work perfectly on Amazon tablets. But many will.

Here's a roundup of some of Liliputing's guides to making Amazon Fire tablets more useful:

Inky Frame 7.3″ is a 7-color ePaper display powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W [ CNX Software]

Available now for about $94, this kit features a 7.3 inch, 7-color E Ink display with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W, microSD card reader, and battery connector.

v24.12: The One With Androids & Cameras, But It's Mainline Linux [postmarketOS]

PostmarketOS 24.12 is a mobile OS with a mainline Linux kernel. It brings initial support for using cameras on some phones (Pixel 3A, Fairphone 5, and Pocophone F1), UI updates, an updated wallpaper, and other improvements.

7-in-1 RGB Cooling Docking Station for handhelds [JSAUX]

This $60 docking station is designed for handheld gaming PCs. Sit your handheld in the cradle and use a USB-C connector to add Ethernet, HDMI, and more USB ports… as well as two cooling fans that help keep the PC from overheating while docked.

AOOSTAR GODX is a mini ITX mini PC with Ryzen 9 6900HX and Radeon RX 6600LE [AOOSTAR]

While the hardware is a few generations old at this point, it's still a lot of power for a compact PC, including discrete graphics and support for up to three 4K/120 Hz displays. Available now for $529 and up, the system also supports up to 64GB of DDR5-4800 dual-channel memory, and two M.2 2280 slots for PCIe 4.0 storage. It has two 2.5 GbE LAN ports as well as USB4, USB 3.2 Type-A, DispliayPort, and HDMI ports, and it measures 200 x 193 x 80mm.

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