Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich hacked onto the Kindle Fire

Amazon’s $199 tablet is rapidly gaining a strong modding community, with tools to make rooting and hacking the tablet being added by the day. The newest hack for the Kindle Fire gets a pre-alpha build of Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), working on the device.

Getting Ice Cream Sandwich on the Fire was the work of some members of the XDA-Developers forum. The build is being called a “pre-alpha” version of Android 4.0. Getting the new OS installed on the device is based on CyanogenMod 9.

From the video posted online, it seems the software is running quite well on Amazon’s little tablet, despite it not being the most powerful device in its class. It’s worth stating that installing this ROM will wipe out all of Amazon’s custom UI on the Fire and break integration with Amazon’s services like video, music, and the store.

If you are interested in flashing your Kindle Fire and getting ICS running on the device there is a great post over at the XDA-Developers forum giving you links to all of the tools and files you’ll need to accomplish that. The post has a link for the ROM file itself as well as an addon to get Google Apps working on your Fire after ICS is installed.

There are some bugs that are still being ironed out like landscape support in the launcher, a MAC address issue, and a CPU scaling issue, but the thread about this seems active and developers seem to be working hard to provide those fixes to this software build.

Did any of you folks get a Kindle Fire for the holidays? Are you thinking about using it as a device to try out some of these hacks and ROMs? Let us know in the comments.