I’ve owned a Kindle for as long as I can remember. It’s easily one of my most used gadgets and the one that’s accompanied me through more flights I can count, weekend breaks, and long sleepless nights engrossed in the latest horror or thriller read. But even as a Kindle die-hard, the more I use it, the more I’ve realised that for all its strengths, it’s a device that is truly living in Amazon’s walled garden, and is essentially behind much of the competition.
You can’t really change how it looks beyond the basics. While you can add fonts, they won’t work with every e-book format. You can’t stop ads without paying extra. You can’t even stop it from downloading updates. The Kindle is designed to be a fully gated experience, and over time, that’s started to bother me. Even more so once I discovered that there is a way to unlock the Kindle’s full capabilities and bring it on par with competitors like the Kobo lineup. All it takes is a jailbreak to unlock the Linux-based Kindle’s full functionality.