Without a doubt, the hottest (pun!) new tablet on the scene right now is the Amazon Kindle Fire.  At $200 it stands to reason that this device may become the best selling “Android” tablet of the year.  Given there are so many cool things we know about it, we can see why people are clamoring for one.  However, for we did know about the Kindle Fire there were plenty of things we didn’t know… Would we be able to sideload apps?  Do we have to root it?  Can we root it?

Thanks to one of our readers, Steve D, we can scratch one of those off the list.  Apparently it’s rather easy to sideload applications onto the tablet.

It turns out you just need to add the USB Vendor ID for the device into the file ~/.android/adb_usb.ini and then adb can find it.

It’s worth noting that these instructions are for Mac however cannot imagine the PC process being much different.

1. On the Kindle Fire Settings screen, go to “Device” and turn On “Allow Installation of Application From Unknown Sources”
2. Plug your Kindle Fire into your Mac.
3. Open ~/.android/adb_usb.ini with your favorite text editor
4. Add the value “0×1949″ to the end of the file and save it.
5. You’ll need to restart the adb server process to get it to re-read that file. Do that with “adb kill-server”.
6. Run “adb devices” and you should see the attached device.

Now, if you’ve got an .apk you want to throw on there, just do “adb install myfavoriteapp.apk”. The app should now be shown on the “Apps” page when you select the “Device” tab (not “cloud”).

Proceed with caution – we’d hate to see you do anything to that new tablet!

Act Local Media

Order a Kindle Fire from Amazon.com