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

Thumbs up to Barnes and Noble

[arob28]

For not suing everybody like Sony is.

Re:Thumbs up to Barnes and Noble

[symbolset]

They seem to be getting behind it. Reportedly they're going to have a regular Android App marketplace on the thing. There are rumors of an official full Android software update. Why fight it? The more people who buy it, the cheaper the economies of scale become for their reader.

Re:Thumbs up to Barnes and Noble

[taustin]

They plan to make money selling books, not book readers. The more readers they sell, the cheaper each one is to manufacture, and the more readres they sell. People who root aren't very likelyt o buy books, but the cheaper the price, the more people who will buy books will buy readers.

Plus, B&N are a brick & mortar store, and always have been. Unlike Amazon, where having employees dealing one on one with customers is an expense to be minimized, at B&N, it's the whole point.

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:Time

[hey!]

Well, been there, done that. I'm generally happy with the results. I thought I'd address the issue with playing videos, then make a few remarks about the advisability of rooting your Nook.

I have not had a problem with playing videos I transcoded from DVD, but it took a little fiddling to get the transcoding details right. Thus far I've had pretty good results with the following (on Linux);

(1) Rip the DVD program to a file like so:
      mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile myfile

This takes the first program (dvd://1) on the DVD, dumps the video and audio (-dumpstream) to a file you specify (myfile). I do this so I can muck around with the transcoding.

(2) Transcode the file into H264 baseline profile like so:
      ffmpeg -i myfile -threads 0 -vcodec libx264 -acodec aac -strict experimental -ab 128k -vpre hq -vpre baseline -b 600k myVideo.mp4

Your distro may require "-acodec libaac" instead, and you might want to double the audio bit rate ("-ab 256k") if you really care about the sound. Expect the transcoding to take several hours.

The results are very good, more than acceptable as far as the video is concerned. The picture has snap and is for the most part motion is smooth. Dark scenes with continuous variations in tone tend to get blotchy, but not as bad as I've had trancoding DVDs to MPEG-4 for my iPod. If there is a lot of busy action in a dark scene you lose some detail. The aspect ratio doesn't match the Nook screen, and for some reason the video does not quite scale to the full width of the screen, although that hardly matters.

The audio is OK out of the speakers (considering) but sounds distorted through headphones -- at least a good pair. This is probably the fault of the experimental aac codec on Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit. You could try encoding to MP3 with LAME instead; I think that should work and should sound good enough for most mortal ears. Alternatively you could go to 256K AAC audio encoding with "-ac 256" and see if the sound's a bit cleaner. I haven't got around to messing with that, but if I can get the audio just right I'd be delighted with the Nook for playing transcoded DVDs.

In any case, I figured this out just out of cussedness. If playing video is really important to you, perhaps you should get a real, more expensive tablet. The main reason I rooted my Nook was to get access to my Kindle library. I found that computer books on the Kindle sucked. This is largely a matter of sloppy conversion, but source code and tables are often provided as images rather than text, and even where provided as text source code is often unreadable on the Kindle. Ironically, I found the iPhone app to be better for reading Kindle computer books than the Kindle. The Nook's screen is a little more fatiguing for long reading sessions than the Kindle, but it's much easier to see diagrams, especially color, but not *just* color. Text tables are a lot easier to make out.

One fault of the Nook reader app is that you can't zoom in on images (although they're more usable than on the Kindle even though you *can* zoom in on that). But if you read your *Kindle* books on the Nook, the Kindle reader for Android allows you to zoom in. So again, Kindle books that rely on illustrations are more usable in the Kindle app running on a rooted Nook than they are either on the Kindle itself or in the Nook reader, which is too bad. I'm trying to support B&N by buying books through the Nook store.

The only other minor issue with using a rooted Nook as a tablet is that unless the method you choose installs a custom tablet UI, you're going to deal with the fact that the Nook lacks the hardware buttons Android 2.x expects a phone to have (search,menu,home, back). The hack I used installed a small on-screen button that brings up a soft menu version of these. It works, but it is not elegant.

My summary: I wouldn't buy the Nook color with the intention of rooting it and using it as a tablet. In a tablet I'd bluetooth and some kind of provision for A/V out. However it's a darn good eReader, and if you have it you might as well root it and be able to use it as a tablet and a Kindle reader too.

More likely to signal a change in Nook design

[perpenso]

Could this signal a change in how mainstream users see devices like this?

Its more likely to signal an upcoming change in Nook design and/or software.

Could rooting Android devices like the Nook ever become mainstream?"

Perhaps after the Linux desktop becomes mainstream.

I love my Nook Color

[Anonymous Coward]

I currently own a nook color that I rooted with Eclair (2.1). For me I wanted something in between a phone and a full laptop for when I am sitting around in waiting rooms. It serves this purpose perfectly. I would not give this tablet to anyone who tech illiterate though, as it is still rough around the corners. Given that the hack is only a few months old, I am extremely impressed with its current abilities, especially with its low price tag, and am eager to see how it continues to progress. Some of the cons are that it is not 3G, does not have a camera, and its sensors may be lacking or the hack making them available seems to be lacking. Though the hack does bring some entirely new functionality to the Nook. It was found that the WiFi chip also includes Bluetooth which is turned off in software. It is now available in some of the ROM's and now provides the ability for Bluetooth keyboards and SIP calling.

Overall, I could not be happier with a $200 tablet. It really does everything I need it to do and then some. It has decent battery life and retains all of the standard Nook functionality in addition to the features provided by rooting it. I consider it a great value when compared to the Galaxy tab as I find it difficult rationalizing the missing features are worth an additional $400. Moreover, so far it seems that B&N have been amenable to people rooting their Nook. As they should, since I buy books from B&N that I wouldn't have previously, and am encouraging others to buy their hardware and books because of their attitude towards the hacking community and the versatility of their hardware.

It really seems like one of those rare situations where everyone is winning. Fortunately, B&N doesn't seem to be in a hurry to shoot themselves in the foot with both barrels, a la, Sony, etc.

Re:I love my Nook Color

[basotl]

Booksellers in Barnes and Noble often seem to point out that it can be rooted to any "geeky" individuals they notice browsing the device.

Re:Full Fledged Android Tablet?

[basotl]

I purchased my NookColor just after launch and preceded to root it.

I use it for reading books, PDF's, Church Applications (a nice Scripture program), taking notes, calendaring, news apps, irc and some games.
It experiences glitches less than my Android phone but others experience may be diffeerent.

Re:Courier

[hairyfeet]

So let me ask you a question: Do you get paid to herd 100 or so shill accounts, AKA the HB Gary troll herder software, or do they pay you to set up accounts one at a time, ala the old slow way? How are the benefits? Do you get dental and vision? 401K? I'd really like to know as frankly I could do about 1000% better job than you shills without even trying, your so damned obvious it ain't even funny.

As for TFA, we and the posters must have different definitions of "cheap". Those $100 aPads are cheap, $250 for an E-reader? The hell with that. Hell at that price I can get a netbook, why would I wan t this thing rooted or not? hell the iPad I is selling now for $300, this thing is too high with a capital T.

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.

Re:Ask Slashdot: Ebay Chinise Tablet "EPAD"

[cstec]

Actually resistive touch screens work fine with a finger, no stylus necessary. Case in point a Palm Treo, which was designed to be dialed with a finger tip. The stylus gives much finer control so apps were written to leverage that, but that wasn't a requirement and any number of Palm apps were 'finger friendly. For a more recent example, the HTC Sense UI is entirely finger oriented and runs perfectly on WinMo devices like a Touch Pro 2.

Re:Full Fledged Android Tablet?

[Aighearach]

The one useful thing about root-ing it, other than giggles, might be underclocking it even more to improve the battery life.

Re:Full Fledged Android Tablet?

[ZosX]

Uh it has the same memory as a galaxy tab and can be overclocked to 1ghz. While the arm core may not be as fast as a galaxy, it can't be nearly as slow as my ancient G1 at 600mhz, which is happily running froyo at the moment and has the least amount of RAM of any android device. (192MB) If 512mb in android isn't enough for you maybe you need to lay off all the widgets and background apps stealing CPU cycles. I would imagine that a lean Nook running froyo would be more than just usable.

The galaxy tab is nice, but also over twice the price of a nook. For some speed isn't everything. I mean what are we really talking about here? Another 2-5 seconds to load a web page? Another 2-3 seconds to load an app? Does everything have to be immediate? I don't see the appeal of the tab either. The honeycomb based tablets are the next generation. It will be interesting when that level of hardware starts hitting close to the price of a nook now.