Turning Your E-Reader Into a Cheap Tablet

grahamsaa writes "NPR's Weekend Edition aired a story today on how rooting the Nook Color can turn it into a full fledged and relatively inexpensive Android tablet. The story claims that the process takes about half an hour, and only requires the purchase of a Nook and a microSD card, and points listeners to a YouTube tutorial on how to root the device. Could this signal a change in how mainstream users see devices like this? Could rooting Android devices like the Nook ever become mainstream?" We ran a story about this in December, and I haven't seen a flood of hacked readers anywhere so I doubt that tablet makers have anything to worry about.

Comments

Time

[jmitchel!jmitchel.co]

I'd put the process at closer to an hour. The big time sink is figuring out WTF is going on and what you want to do about it - there are no less than four major options, with a dozen smaller decisions to make, all wrapped up in a slightly hermetic nomenclature. It still ain't for the weak kneed and non-technical. HOWEVER, the nightly CyanogenMod 7 build is getting really close to maximum awesomeness - video playback doesn't work quite right, bluetooth doesn't work quite right, but both of them work. By late april it should be a clear winner, and that will make the decision much easier.

Re:Time

[ThatsMyNick]

Nook Color comes with LCD, not E-ink.

Re:Full Fledged Android Tablet?

[basotl]

The Nook Color has the same amount of ram as the Galaxy Tab. I don't know what you are talking about there.
http://www.androidtablets.net/forum/nook-color-technical/3483-nookcolor-full-specifications.html
http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_p1000_galaxy_tab-3370.php

In addition rooting allows overclocking the Nook Color which greatly increases the speed.