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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?
> The minimum spec for Android Honeycomb is a dualcore Tegra 2 (A9) chip.
You'll struggle to find a citation for that. Don't bother with the rumours sites please - something from Google would be great.
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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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? :)
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.
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.
Yeah, 1.0 is the Nook software/firmware.
I haven't had a chance to tear it apart yet to see "what makes it tick" yet. Hopefully I will find time soon.
It's not all that hard, actually. The unstable thing TFA talks about is Honeycomb, but you can also turn Nook into a tablet running 2.1 - with all bells and whistles working, since the OS remains the same, you just unlock its features. Even get the Market on it if you want. Here is all you need to know
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 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
> 2) Newspaper
> 3) A whole library of books. (!)
>
> 5) Web Browser
> 6) Email,
> 9) Hotline to my friends and family (Facebook!)
>
> Should I go on?
Please don,t because you could go on forever if you listed every single thing you can do with a web browser, like buy things, find a parking spot, change my hotel reservation, read slashdot, read engadget, etc, etc. That's great. You have a web browser on a tiny screen and a slow(ish) network that costs a decent amount of money per month. I'm not saying the browser is the only feature, but that you're listing out "features" that are pretty much one feature.