If you purchased a Kindle Fire at any point before Amazon refreshed the lineup in September, I've got bad news for you: none of the improvements made to the software used by the 2012 Kindle Fire and the Kindle Fire HD are going to be brought to your tablet. If you have any particular complaints about the way your older Fire works or acts, that's too bad, because it's the end of the line.

Luckily, the Fire's low price and popularity relative to other Android tablets has made it a common target for Android's bustling open-source community, which has automated most of the sometimes-messy process of rooting and flashing your tablet. The Kindle Fire Utility boils the whole rooting process down to a couple of steps, and from there it's pretty easy to find pretty-stable Jelly Bean ROMs. A CyanogenMod-based version is actively maintained, but I prefer the older Hashcode ROM, which is very similar to the interface on the Nexus 7.

If you need extra help, Liliputing has a pretty handy guide to get you through everything—bear in mind, however, the standard warnings about rooting tablets. As we'll soon see, installing different software on your Kindle Fire can greatly increase its speed and utility, but it doesn't come without caveats. If you choose to do this to your older Kindle Fire, know that you're definitely voiding what's left of your warranty, and though I've had no major issues with the tools above, you do run the risk of turning your tablet into a useless brick. Some Android features may work intermittently or not at all, and there may be software bugs that the maintainers of these ROMs never get around to fixing. There are also security concerns, since unlocking your tablet's bootloader can make it that much easier for it to be screwed up by malicious code or, in the case of theft, used to access your personal data.

If you understand and accept the risks, Jelly Bean is in many ways a huge improvement over Amazon's Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich-based software. The increased performance is the most evident gain—gone is the jerky scrolling and slow browsing performance of this and every other Kindle Fire we've seen so far, and in its place is a smooth experience that's not much different from the Nexus 7.

What's it like?

The particular ROM that we used for our testing sticks very close to the stock Android experience, which makes using our rooted Kindle Fire more or less identical to using the Nexus 7. The Fire's lower-resolution 1024x600 screen does make things a bit fuzzier than the 1280x800 screen in the Nexus 7, but it doesn't reduce the number of icons or widgets that will fit on the home screen. As when comparing the Kindle Fire to the Kindle Fire HD, you notice the difference the most while reading text, which benefits the most from higher pixel density.

The tablet's older, weaker hardware relative to the newer Kindle Fires and the Nexus 7 doesn't pose a problem to Jelly Bean, which is just as smooth and consistent on our rooted tablet as it is on other older devices—these are two adjectives that can't be used to describe Amazon's own Android fork, which is infamously jerky and imprecise when scrolling or resizing items. It helps that the particular ROM we're using slightly overclocks the 2011 Fire's processor to the same 1.2GHz used in the 2012 Fire, and that the older tablet's 512MB of RAM has more to do with the number of apps that can be loaded into memory than it does with speed.

The presence of the Google Play store gets you far more third-party apps than Amazon's own store (including e-reading apps from direct competitors like Kobo and Barnes & Noble), which is probably the single biggest benefit of rooting your Fire. If you're deeply invested in Amazon's ecosystem, though, you do have to absorb some losses: the Android Kindle app has fewer features and fonts than the native Kindle version, and there isn't yet an app for streaming from the Amazon Instant Video library. If you're looking for a general-purpose tablet, though, Jelly Bean and Google Play are both net improvements.

How much faster is it?

The Silk browser's performance is one of the Fire's biggest disappointments—Amazon claims that its server-side processing capabilities speed up its browser relative to the competition, but our qualitative and quantitative benchmarks have never been able to back up this claim.

Sunspider is one of the few benchmarks we can run in Amazon's Android fork. Upgrading the 2011 Kindle Fire to Jelly Bean and running the benchmark in Google Chrome nets us a score that not only beats both the 2011 and 2012 Fires, but also edges out the Nexus 7. As we saw in our Kindle Fire review, though, Sunspider scores don't have much to do with the amount of time a page actually takes to load. Comparing the rooted Kindle Fire to the 2012 Fire and the Nexus 7 show just how far behind Amazon's browser can lag.

Page Rooted Kindle Fire (Chrome) 2012 Kindle Fire (Silk) Nexus 7 arstechnica.com 5.6 seconds 6.8 seconds 5.1 seconds NYT.com 6.3 seconds 8.6 seconds 6.1 seconds qwantz.com 2.8 seconds 6.5 seconds 2.4 seconds

In other cases, such as application load times, Amazon's software doesn't actually get in the way, but it still feels like it does. Apps like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Spotify, and various games available on both Google Play and Amazon's app store launched in roughly the same amount of time on both the 2012 Kindle Fire and our rooted Kindle Fire. The problem here lies mostly in perceived speed: in stock Android, tapping an app immediately invokes a reaction. Depending on the app, that reaction could be a fully-loaded program that's ready to use, or a blank screen that stays blank until the app is loaded and ready to use.

In Amazon's software, tapping an application launches it, but there's a delay for most apps—rather than throwing up a blank page while the software loads, the tablet simply sits there until it has something to show you. The absolute time you're waiting is often the same, but the thing about tablets and touch interfaces that Jelly Bean (and iOS) get right is that the appearance of speed and smoothness is at least as important as actual speed and smoothness.

How does it compare to the competition?

Rooting the old Kindle Fire gave us our first chance to compare it directly to the Nexus 7 and other tablets using our standard benchmarks—this will show us how the Kindles' dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP4 stacks up to other Android tablets when the playing field is leveled.

Looking at the Geekbench and GLBenchmark scores, the Kindle Fire's CPU performance is pretty impressive for a year-old, dual-core tablet, though its GPU performance is decidedly middle-of-the-road. The Geekbench scores suggest that the OMAP 4 CPU cores are actually more efficient than the NVIDIA Tegra 3 cores in the Nexus 7, though the Nexus 7 will still be faster when all four of its cores are being used.

Conclusions: Amazon can do better

Seeing just how well the 2011 Kindle Fire handles Jelly Bean drives home what we've said in every Kindle Fire review we've done: this software can and should be better than it is. Amazon is in a unique position compared to anyone else using Android: they've got that all-important media ecosystem that Google, Samsung, and others have tried to create, but theirs is actually good. Amazon has a large library of competitively-priced music and video, and they add to that an industry-leading e-bookstore, a competitive cloud storage service, and a video streaming service that is making inroads against the likes of Netflix and Hulu.

On top of this, Amazon has demonstrated an Apple-like ability to generate buzz about and interest in its products—its Kindle Fire events in the last two years have taken at least a couple of pages out of Cupertino's playbook—and having the top spot on the Amazon.com homepage is advertising that most tablet companies would kill for. Its hardware is reasonably attractive and well-specced, and hits a wide variety of price points. Amazon's got just about everything else right, which is at least part of the reason why their jerky, custom software is so off-putting.

It might be that adding Jelly Bean's speed-increasing underpinnings to Amazon's software would improve the situation enough to negate stock Android's performance advantages; Amazon hasn't said whether this is in the works, but the past and current Kindle Fire hardware is good enough that an upgrade is within the realm of possibility. Amazon's services and reach are good enough that the Kindle Fire lineup could provide a better Android experience than Google's own Nexus devices; unfortunately, at this point, the Kindle Fire software is one of the stronger arguments against third-party Android skins.