Nook Color Is Now a $250 Honeycomb Tablet 105
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."
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hacking the ebook readers may be the only way to make them really useful.
Scientific American had an article about the the E-Readers; The Trouble with E-Readers, by David Pogue [scientificamerican.com], where they essentially says that they are a hype.
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 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?
Re:The color Nook is none too speedy at all... (Score:2, Insightful)
My nook color is a lot smoother now that I overclocked it up to 1 Ghz from 800 mhz. Also, running a different launcher program makes way more difference than I expected. If you remove the various phone services that are built into android, it also helps a bit.