Now You Can Use the Nook Touch ... As a Kindle

An anonymous reader writes "Barnes & Nobles' latest e-reader has already been hacked. In a couple of surprise videos this morning, the hacker zoryl showed the Nook Touch running the Kindle app and running ADW Launcher. The second video also hints at the presence of Bluetooth."

Comments

Re:So how long

[Dyinobal]

People buying nooks, over their kindle because then they can use B&Ns service and the Kindle service as well.

Re:So how long

[Anonymous Coward]

B&N have not caused any problems for the thousands of people who are VERY publicly hacking Nook Colors with a full Android.
And we've been doing that since shortly after they were released. There are multiple versions of Android in fact, and even more different roms to choose from.

Amazon has not made any noise that I have heard about either- I think they hope to achieve extra e-book sales from those who have hacked B&N devices while B&N is hoping for 2 things:
Increased customer loyalty (and purchases) from those of us who have replaced the stock rom
Huge amounts of internet buzz and free advertising about their e-readers.

I've had one custom rom or another on my Nook Color for 6 months now and I don't know of any lawsuits from anyone, so I think your guess of a week is maybe a bit off. ;)

Re:So how long

[fluffy99]

So how long before Barnes and Noble or Amazon flip their wig and start filing lawsuits and or releasing patches to fix such a thing. I give it about a week tops.

So far they haven't complained about the Nook Color being rooted and used as an Android Tablet. A few of the engineers in fact are quite supportive of it. A Nook Color with custom firmware is only slightly below a Galaxy Tab wifi version with respect to hardware for about $100-$150 less. I suspect B&N isn't making much profit on the readers, and probably not losing much revenue from a small percentage of their sales to users who intend to root them and never actually use them as an e-reader. In the grand scheme, I they'd spend more money trying to DRM and hardware lock things, then just taking the high road and ignoring the issue.

B&N and Nook are fairly open

[xzvf]

I think B&N as the underdog has purposely left the reader fairly open. The Nook Color is extremely easy to root and has been for months. They use epub and load many other formats without charging any conversion fees. I speculate that if the publishers would let them get away with it, there wouldn't be any DRM either. While I'm sure B&N would prefer you purchase your ebooks from them, I'm purchased non-DRM versions direct from O'Rielly and Packt and they work fine on the Nook. Considering that Amazon wants to lock you into their proprietary format, severely limits the appeal of their devices for me.

Re:B&N and Nook are fairly open

[caseih]

I'm not sure what you're talking about when you say the Kindle locks you into a proprietary format. It doesn't at all. It's true that just like books you buy from BN, Amazon Kindle books are DRMed. But the device is perfectly happy to display any .mobi file I throw at it. Thanks to Calibre I can translate back and forth between mobi and epub with ease, and stick any of my O'Reilly books on my Kindle. I also love the scripts that come with Calibre to create custom newspapers for me based on feeds from BBC or CNN or other news sources. Pretty slick. Also the text to speech on the Kindle is very listenable; I've listened to about a dozen books while driving, and while it's a slight bit fatiguing to listen to, it works pretty well. The voice is about as good as OS X's Alex voice.

I have a Hanvon 516 reader that handles just about any non-DRM format as well, and even with it I would never do without Calibre. An indispensable tool for any e-book reader.

Valid complaints against the Kindle could include: fairly crappy warranty on a very fragile screen, potential privacy issues when the unit phones home, and the ability of Amazon to remote delete books from kindles. But this nonsense about locking into some proprietary format is just silly.

Re:B&N and Nook are fairly open

[fluffy99]

I think B&N as the underdog has purposely left the reader fairly open.

I honestly don't think it was intentionally left open for the purposes of rooting/repurposing. I think they kept the reference board design which normally will boot from the SD card, perhaps thinking this would help avoid bricked units down the road and better support firmware updates. That the Android community has embraced the hardware has only helped their sales and popularity. Certainly, some of those units are getting used as generic tablets and they're not buying B&N ebooks, but I don't think that's actually hurting their profits.

Re:Android

[Anonymous Coward]

A Ford with a Chevy motor is probably one of the most popular rat rod recipes out there.. And the Chrysler Torqueflight transmission is one of the automatic transmissions of choice.. There are kits available that make a Chevy powered Ford with a Mopar transmission very easy to build.

Re:Android

[brusk]

If that analogy were a car it would be a broken-down Yugo.

Re:"Now" you can?

[proverbialcow]

This is the Nook Simple Touch, which was available yesterday. The Nook Color's been out since November. It's news because the various Nooks have been rooted for a while now, and the latest Nook iteration apparently did nothing to make it harder.

Re:So how long

[hedwards]

I doubt that B&N cares one way or the other about people hacking their hardware. Considering that Nooks aren't locked into their store specifically, I have to assume that they make at least some profit off the sale of Nooks, even if the profit is minimal.

Usefulness?

[proverbialcow]

The touch screen isn't capacitive; it apparently uses a much less precise IR system to track your finger. So, neat, you got it rooted and can run Android apps - on a six-inch grayscale screen that can only roughly approximate gestures. I think that if you want to pay for an e-reader and use it as a tablet, the Nook Color is the better bet.

Re:Usefulness?

[MSRedfox]

It's highly useful. You get all the benefit of e-ink and the ability to buy books at any bookstore. This makes it better than an e-ink device that is locked to a single ebook provider. As for swapping over to the Nook Color, that's fine if someone wants an LCD screen, but some of us like the idea of having an open e-ink device.

Re:Usefulness?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Aside from the purely recreational hacking value, the real upside to getting Android applications running on the Touch would be expanding its capabilities for handling the subset of activities that are largely text-based, or tolerant of greyscale graphics; but lie beyond ebooks specifically:

Email, light web browsing(Hello Wikipedia...), grabbing a map and directions, that sort of thing.

Anything that depends on capacitive precision, 30FPS screen refresh, or color is going to be a waste of time, in practice; but there are a number of activities that could usefully be performed with reading-focused hardware that are not supported by the stock firmware.

Re:So how long

[DrgnDancer]

Honestly I don't think it's all that arguable. B&N's Nook color, even without hacking it, is essentially a fairly decent Android tablet for $250. I haven't hacked mine yet, and I still have a decent selection of games, web, e-mail, and quite a few utility apps just from the B&N store. At some point I'll probably hack it to run stock Android, but so far I haven't had a good reason to do so. The main reason I wanted a tablet was e-books, which it obviously handles quite well. Beyond that I mostly use my computer for stuff if I'm local at home or work, and my iPhone for true portability.