Oct 2011 A New Tablet Courtesy of Barnes & Noble
So on Friday night, after 3 weeks+ of trial and error, research and failed attempts I finally was able to hack my Nook Color and turn it into a full Android tablet. Thank you Barnes & Noble for making a beautifully designed piece of hardware and making your Nook Color software available as an Android app which is what makes it possible to go for a full overwrite of the tablet software rather than the alternatives.
What did I learn?
- The android development community is amazing. There is a ton of threads, instruction and patches to work with. In fact it was actually too much for mere mortals like myself with limited time.
- There is definitely room for a 7″ tablet in our lives. Riding the train with all of the ipadders it is easy to see the popularity but if you are carrying a laptop, and a phone, an 11″ tablet is overkill.
- RSS feeds matter. Barnes & Noble and Amazon have to understand there is SO much content out there they can’t expect to fully control the publishing process.
How did I make it work and be stable?
The answer wasn’t putting Android or CM7 on a bootable SD card, couldn’t get that stable and realized I wouldn’t want to boot into the Nook OS once I could get to my books and magazines. It also wasn’t wasn’t doing a “Auto-Nooter” upgrade adding Android Market to the BN Nook Color OS since the Nook is being updated regularity.
The answer was to use the Cynogenmod 7 Build 177 version of Android and it is a reasonably recent build but not the latest nightly upload. Then the last “signed” version of Google Apps (8/28). Big thanks to XDADevelopers and this guide in particular.