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Nook Color Is Now a $250 Honeycomb Tablet
Barnes & Noble markets the Nook Color as an e-reader with tablet functionality handily built in, but that designation undersells it a bit — it's just as easy to see it as an Android tablet with a 7" multitouch display and a Cortex A8 processor that happens to have strong book-reading features. Compared to the current big name in 7" Android tablets, Samsung's Galaxy Tab, it's quite underspec'd (no camera or GPS receiver, Wi-Fi but no 3G), but it also costs only $250.
A few days ago, Android hackers managed to put Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) onto the Color, though in a mostly crippled state. Now Liliputing points out that they've enabled hardware acceleration, too. Pretty neat that one of the cheapest capacitive-screen tablets you can get handles an operating system that a few weeks back was expected to require heavier iron. As comments at Engadget point out, it's not the very smoothest performance, but this is an early build by enthusiasts, and doesn't look too shabby. The developer's announcement of the port points out that this is a work in progress: "What is not working... pretty much everything else, no accelerometer, no wlan, no sound. Haven't started working on those things yet."
They found a very complex way to break a Nook Color?
It has an LCD display so although I guess you CAN read books on it to the same extent you can on a laptop or a tablet but to call it an e-reader seems a bit misleading. It's not well very suited for reading books.
A few days ago, Android hackers managed to put Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) onto the Color, though in a mostly crippled state.
And it will remain in a crippled state. The minimum spec for Android Honeycomb is a dualcore Tegra 2 (A9) chip. The Nook has a single core A8 chip.
Which makes the title:
Nook Color Is Now a $250 Honeycomb Tablet
And since it makes no sense for the Nook to jump to a more expensive dual-core processor, it means we now have four mobile OS variations from Google:
1) Chrome OS
2) Android 2.x for Phones
3) Android 2.x for Tablets
4) Android 3.x Honeycomb
Then add HTC, Motorola, Samsung and DELL slapping incompatible UI and extensions on top of each of those offers.
The way it's going, Google fragmenting their OS solutions will soon be a drinking game.
I have no interest in paying separate 3G fees or contracts, and I already have an Android phone. So I thought the NOOKcolor would be a great way of playing some games and reading some free e-books on long airplane flights.
I bought one, and within an hour had it rooted, replaced the sucky built-in "Home" activity with LauncherPro, replaced the sucky built-in soft keyboard with Smart Keyboard Pro, and re-mapped the hardware volume buttons into the missing hardware MENU and BACK buttons. (You can do the last part with a "Soft Keys" service, but I prefer the hardware keys.) It plays Angry Birds and even X Plane 9 Mobile very well. The orientation sensor seems to be a bit weaker, tipping acts more like a 20-sided die vs a sphere.
In fact, since I have very little interest in paying the same price for electronic books that cannot be copied, shared, or transferred like real books, I have been returning to the classics - authors that have enriched the public domain after their years of exclusivity. I find the free FBReader to have a better interface than the built-in Barnes and Noble book reading interface.
Many other games have not yet fixed their assumptions about maximum screen pixel dimensions, so they have hit-testing or background art scaling problems. Those will get fixed over time. Some apps or games like Alchemy Classic work better with more real estate, and some apps or games like my own Qwiz - Hiragana make use of the bigger screen with larger print or graphic elements.
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I have an android phone also. Putting honeycomb on the nook might be entertaining. My observation of the nook color so far is that it is a little slow. So it is not surprising that honeycomb is a little laggy. What would be truly amazing is if they (the individuals porting honeycomb to nook) actually fixed the performance via code and handed it back to B&N. That would be too funny. Could be a plus for B&N and take them beyond just e-books. B&N do have a few apps besides the e-book reader for the nook. They have stated that they will have more in the future. But imagine if they opened up the android market place for the nook. They could go from 6 apps to millions. Although, allot of hardware is missing on the color nook that android apps often utilise. I think it would be fun to have a race between e-book readers and pad computers for price and features.
And it will remain in a crippled state. The minimum spec for Android Honeycomb is a dualcore Tegra 2 (A9) chip. The Nook has a single core A8 chip.
http://twitter.com/#!/morrildl/status/22845294886518785
I've played extensively with a Nook Color.... and dispite a luscious color screen, it's none too speedy even doing what it's supposed to be doing, being a bookreader. Pages stutter as they cross the page; the update rate is not only well below 10 Hz but it's also irregular.
I can only fear what it might be like running something "that should have more CPU available".
That said, for $250, who cares? :)
Call me when you can run Linux on an iPad in a VM.
It's been my universal experience that community hardware ROMs tend to suck, and worse, the community usually isn't honest and upfront about all the problems; it's only after you install, find a slew of problems, and start googling that you find all the email and forum threads with dozens of "me too"s and no response from developers. I installed Cyanogen 6.1.1 on my Android phone, and it turns out there are a slew of issues that were reported in the 6.1 release candidates that "cyanogen" and his buddies just never could be pissed to fix before final release OR the .1.1 update that followed. It doesn't support hidden SSIDs, when the stock ROM does just fine. It also no longer supports sleeping with WiFi; if the phone goes into sleep mode, you have to cycle WiFi on and off again. Worse, wifi goes dead in a way that doesn't trigger the normal switchover to cellular data, which REALLY sucks if you're using something like Google Voice for texts and phone calls - you simply will not get the calls, missed call notification, or text messages. The sensitivity of the touch screen changed such that you now have to hold the phone to use the screen (ie, you can't tap something on the screen while it sits on your desk). All these issues have been reported in the forums and had bug reports filed, and they're sitting, untouched.
Another example: the WRT-610N. Supported by one of the alternative ROMs for access points. Trouble is: performance sucked compared to the stock drivers, it would hang about every 18-24 hours, and so on. Lots of impressive features, but utter Fail when it came to basic reliability.
Please help metamoderate.
Why bother when an Archos 70 can do exactly the same thing without all the hassle, for 280$?
If Google (or whomever) is going to cripple non-3g devices, then they'll just lose out when the cheap Chinese knockoffs start hitting the market in large numbers.
As far as I know, these cheap Chinese knockoffs already exist, and they already run Android without the Market.
You don't have to be a genius to realize that the additional $600/yr for 3G connectivity (on top of the already-expensive phone plans) is keeping a lot of people out of the market
Or it's driving a lot of people to Apple, which allows full App Store access to owners of iPod touch and iPad Wi-Fi hardware.
The Galaxy Tab is a nice device, but there's too much battery-killing junk on it
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G, and the like can be turned on and off.
I have a Kindle 3. And love it. I have bought few books, but use it extensively to read other files I have got (ebooks, PDFs, simple text files, ... - And yes, I'll recognize it's not 100% legally acquired material) And no, I don't and won't see it as my long-term library. From the books I have read, I have already bought two - One to keep as a hard-copy in my bookshelf, one to give away as a present. Oh, and of course, I have also downloaded electronic versions of books I have sitting on my bookshelf for years.
I have stuffed my Kindle with a couple hundred magazines and books I had lying around my computer, waiting for some time to read with no distractions, so I can now just pick up anything I fancy, as it's all there in my pocket. It is very useful as a quick reference from technical manuals, but due to the much better back-and-forth navigability of a paper book (I am one of those that often uses three fingers pointing to different pages at mid-read), I'll often prefer to stand up and get the book.
I have a Kindle 3. And love it. I have bought few books, but use it extensively to read other files I have got (ebooks, PDFs, simple text files, ...
How good is the PDF experience on the Kindle3? I have an iPad, and it's decent (color), but it's a bit heavy for reading long hours at night. My main usage of ebooks are to read my tech manuals which are all PDFs.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
However I see a problem with the ebook, and that is that if you break your reader or run out of battery (either will happen eventually) then the books you have will be unreadable. Breaking a paper book doesn't make it unreadable, and at worst you have to re-glue the pages but usually a piece of tape is sufficient.
And if I run a book through a cross-cut paper shredder how much tape do you think it'll take?
Good to know that its 2.1. All it says on system information is version 1.0. But that I am assuming is referring to the e-book application. I haven't had a chance to tear it apart yet to see "what makes it tick" yet. Hopefully I will find time soon. Thanks again for the 2.1 and missing JIT info, it gives me a place to start from.
The experience is... Ok. Although not stellar, by far - PDFs are usually produced to be displayed/printed on a letter/A4 format, that is, about 3x the size of the screen. The Kindle tries to get as close as possible to the PDF by cropping the displayed portion. Sadly, it does not recognize elements that make the display be too reduced (i.e. the header/footer, repeated at every page with minimal modifications)... But anyway, reading it at page level zoom is usually very uncomfortable (and I have very good sight), if at all possible.
Zooming into the text is useless, as the zoom cuts the page in half horizontally - so if you are not reading material with columns (i.e. a magazine), it's basically useless.
What I do, and have read several books with, is to rotate the screen and hold it in landscape. The cropping is then adjusted for maximum effective horizontal space. It is still not as comfortable as reading a text, native format - but it is much better, and more than enough for reading a book.
Finally, if your PDF is mostly text, you can mail it to [your-address]@free.kindle.com, with "convert" as the subject. It usually does the right thing.
The Android OS is a heavy stutter. No matter how you look at it, Android visualization (animation) are very sluggish by design .... and based on video previous, it does not look like Honeycomb will be an improvement.
I spent several hours this last weekend trying to get Android running on my old WinMo phone. An HTC Titan, it sports dual 400 Mhz PPC CPUs and 64 MB of RAM. WinMo 6.1 is so broken, Android is its only hope! Because Android, with its Linux foundations, is the new "make it work" platform! it's lightweight, powerful, and provides a standard, hardware-independent platform that provides positive network effects! (such as the Android marketplace)
I didn't buy a Nook, I downloaded the Nook app for my Android phone. Whether or not you download the Nook app for my Android phone, or upgrade a Nook with Android, you end up with a device that is not only an e-book reader, but many other things!
Who wants a single-function device? Not me! My Android phone is:
1) Phone.
2) Newspaper
3) A whole library of books. (!)
4) A map of every country, city, and state in the world
5) Web Browser
6) Email,
7) MP3 player!
8) Driving directions when I want them
9) Hotline to my friends and family (Facebook!)
10) Radio, but one that plays virtually any station I want from anywhere in the world. (TuneIn Radio)
11) Microportable television.
Should I go on? Who wants to carry an ebook reader when you could be carrying so much more without any additional weight?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The Pandigital "Novel" is a nice little Android tablet that is marketed as an ebook reader. It's only $160 (cdn), at Futureshop & Best Buy (Canada). It's also on sale in the US, but with a more crippled version of Android.
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Frankly, I've used the stock firmware on a number of Android devices (started with a G1, currently have an HTC Vision, T-Mobile's G2) and I wouldn't go back to the carrier-provided OS if you paid me
I've got a G2 as well. I don't suppose you realized that all the bugs I'm talking about apply to your device?
Or that the G2 has the most stock, unmolested Android installation of any phone/carrier save maybe the Nexus S?
Please help metamoderate.
I call bullshit on that article's author (or he is seriously misinformed). E-Readers are not perfect but they are definitely a working substitute for paperbacks.
E-Readers mostly fail at works with lots of illustrations (if you're using a Nook Color to read ebooks you're doing it wrong) or things like textbooks. Also many ebooks have sub-par formatting compared to their tree brethren.
They’re much more fragile than books. They run out of power, leaving you with nothing to read.
Any e-ink display device is not "much more fragile" than your typical paperback book unless you like to lug books around construction yards and hit them with hammers all day. If anything my Kindle is more rugged in average use scenarios than your typical mass market paperback because after reading tens of thousands of pages on it the cover hasn't fallen apart and the spine isn't in serious need of a re-gluing. I've also dropped it and sat on it a few times to no ill effect.
I don't even know where the power statement is coming from. Any e-ink (and even some LCD) display devices can go multiple days, even weeks, of reading without needing a charge. I admit that if you live in a third world country without an electric grid this may not be sufficient. Somehow I doubt the author of that article does.
But e-ink is also slow. With each page turn, there’s a distracting black-white-black flashing as the screen obliterates one page to prepare for the next.
Laughable. It's is at the very least comparable to how fast you turn a page when reading. It is likely faster. I'd be going off pure opinion to comment on the distracting thing (I don't find it more distracting).
You can’t read a Kindle book on a Barnes & Noble Nook or a Sony Reader book on an iPad. You can still read a 200-year-old printed book. But the odds of being able to read one of today’s e-books in 200 years, or even 20, is practically zero.
This is both true and very untrue and quite disingenuous. Without stripping DRM you can't convert books of one format to another to read on a different device. DRM for books is indeed a problem and it needs to go. However, if you strip DRM or use DRM-less sources for ebooks then you can effectively read any e-book on any device: you will just likely have to convert it to another format first. There are multiple easy to use applications that exist out there to do this (in bulk even).
I know for a fact that I will still be able to read my e-books in 20 years. While I won't be alive in 200 and I probably won't be able to read any of my paperbacks in 200 years. I've had paperbacks in my attic for only 10-15 years that are barely legible due to damage from heat, humidity, and tiny creatures that like cellulose. The ones in my bookcases have faired better but the pages still become brittle and yellow tinged. Hardcovers fair much better because they tend to use acid-free cloth paper.
The problem after 200 years for an ebook will not be that the format will be outdated (it likely will be but that's small potatoes) but that it is very likely few devices will exist to retrieve the data from whatever media it is on. At least if the relatively short period of computer history is anything to go by.
For the parent:
And if you buy a paper book then your kids can read it too, but will the ebook reader and the books it contains survive that long?
Honestly, that's a tricky question. Some of the books I read as a kid ended up in pretty bad condition (covers falling off, spines in need of repair) and are a testament to how rough kids can be on things. I remember breaking my gameboy because it was in my backpack with heavy textbooks and I dropped my backpack one too many times the wrong way on the ground.
Do I think an ebook reader can be made to survive children or children taught how to properly treat an ebook reader? Yes.
Do I think most ebook readers, withou