As we said in our review, the Kindle Fire is a great portal into Amazon's ecosystem — that isn't really disputed. What the Kindle Fire isn't, though, is compelling hardware. So imagine, if you will, all the best bits of the 7-inch slate grafted into a more interesting tablet like the (original) Samsung Galaxy Tab. With some help from the xda-developers forum and a general interest in tweaking, GigaOm's Kevin Tofel decided to turn his old TouchWiz device into a surrogate Fire.

The results are reportedly a mixed bag. The Fire homepage can be treated as a separate launch window, with oversized fonts and propensity to force close often. The Amazon Store and Amazon Video apps, however, work separately and apparently quite well. In the end, Tofel says he'll keep the apps and ditch the user interface, which is probably the best of both worlds. Meanwhile, Amazon is still the content marketplace of choice, so we don't think the company would be looking down on this trickery (not until more inspired hardware comes out, at least). 

GigaOm has some more details on how you can try this at home — which theoretically should work with any Android device. What do you have to lose by trying? Exactly.