Amazon Kindle Fire: Much more open than I thought

James posted an article earlier this morning explaining that he thought the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet are not as open as he had hoped. Now that I have been using both devices for a day (big, multi-page review coming here tomorrow) I have to disagree with James and personally think the Kindle Fire is MUCH more open than I ever thought we would see, especially right out of the box.

In the past one major reason I always bought Kobo or Barnes & Noble Nooks for reading was the more open nature and support for EPUB and other standards while Amazon was pretty locked down with their Kindle content. Thus, I was expecting to see the same thing on the Amazon Kindle Fire. However, by simply plugging in the Kindle Fire to your PC or Mac you will see the internal memory appears as a drive where you can drag photos, documents, and other content right onto the device. In addition, by following these steps detailed by my buddy Sascha Segan in his guide titled, How To Run Almost Any Android App On the Kindle Fire, you can turn your new Kindle Fire into a very functional Android tablet.

I now have both the Kobo and Nook ebook reader applications and books on my Amazon Kindle Fire so with this one device I can read all the books I have purchased over the years on a single device. Granted, I can do this with my Apple iPad too, but the Kindle Fire is only $199.

For the serious geek, both the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet have also been rooted and you can hack away to your delight as well. I doubt the mainstream consumer will care about doing this, but these tablets are both quite open IMHO.