An enterprising young man by the name of yifanlu recently developed a new solution for the Amazon Kindle Touch that Jailbreaks it. The new Kindle uses a different operating system then previous iterations of the device line of e-readers. As such, no current current hacks will work on it and they need to be remade from scratch in order to work.
Digging deep in the code this fine young man discovered the Kindle Touch has a built in accelerator, proximity sensor and microphone, but there is no code functionality for it yet. Right now the Kindle Touch does not have the ability to switch to landscape mode at all, which is one of the few drawbacks about it. Yifanlu claims that he is currently developing a solution in order for the native e-reader to read EPUB books, which would be a huge step in the right direction.
Right now the Jailbreaking procedure is relevant only to developers who actually write the code for it. All of the tools are in place for people to do this now with a stable solution that stemmed from Amazon leaving SSH access in diagnostics mode.
Finally, he had this to say about the entire process “Much of the operating system is no longer written in Java, but are now in HTML5 and Javascript. In fact, many of the interfaces on the Touch are actually web pages in disguise. For example: the password entry screen, the search bar, the browser (is just an HTML page with a frame), the Wifi selection screen, and even the music player. Obviously, these can’t all run natively in HTML and JS, or the device will be even slower (and it is pretty damn slow). What Amazon did is write a couple of Javascript hooks that are implemented by native libraries and events are read by these libraries and they perform actions accordingly. In short, Javascript will run native code. This is a goldmine, there could be many possible ways of using this to our advantage.”
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
