ericwoodward's tumblog

For many years, I have been interested in “tweaking” electronics to get the most out of them. Although some of these tweaks have involved hardware, my preference has always been for software and firmware modifications, and over the past few years I’ve used a few: I’ve installed a custom firmware for my PSP, one for my WDTV Live, a custom OS-on-a-memory card for my wife’s Nintendo DS, and I’ve enabled the family Wii to load games off of a USB drive. All in all, not too bad as far as tweaking goes (and, in case anyone is wondering, I didn’t actually “discover” any of these wonderful techniques for improving these devices: I stand on the shoulders of giants, merely using the software and guides linked above).

At any rate, over the past few weeks, I’ve heard rumblings about an E-Reader being sold by Barnes & Noble called a NOOKColor (no, really, that’s the official name), a 7-inch, touchscreen, full color book reader that runs Android 2.1 (with a custom interface). Many of the aforementioned rumblings have been good news from Android enthusiasts regarding ways to open up the device and turn it into a moderately featured, moderately priced ($250 at Sprawlmart) tablet.

Feeling intrigued, I went out and bought one last Thursday. By that night, I had a custom version of Froyo running off of a memory card. By the Friday night, I had gained root (Superuser) access to the device, installed the Android Market (which lets you download other apps), and installed ADW Launcher (which lets you specify how many rows and columns to use on the home screen and app drawer - 4x5 wasn’t cutting it). A couple more hours of fiddling with settings and downloading “tweaked” apps over the weekend, and I had all that I’d hoped for and more: a very well featured, moderately priced tablet.

Screen grabs are available here. I love the Aquarium Live Wallpaper, especially.

I mean, it’s no iPad, and it doesn’t have a camera, force feedback, GPS, 3G or a set of dedicated buttons. But it’s great for around the use as a portable reader, browser, and Pandora player… And SoftKeys replaces most of the need for a set of dedicated buttons… Plus, Angry Birds plays very well on a bigger screen, and YouTube just looks fantastic. All told, a fun little device.

One word of warning: The install process wasn’t completely smooth, but some of that may have had to do with an old installation of the Android SDK I had hanging around which kept interfering with Windows 7 ability to load the correct drivers. All told, this isn’t a hack that I would recommend to anyone who isn’t willing to put a little bit of time into understanding the directions (not just reading, but following them very specifically). In the end, the fixes for all of my issues were spelled out, I just had to make sure that I did exactly as instructed.

Interestingly enough, in the week since I started fiddling with this little device, a flashable port (which can be loaded on demand) of the next version of the Android Operating System, Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), was released. This is particularly exciting, in part because it is supposed to include a host of tablet-oriented improvements, and in part because this is a pre-release version - the real version of Honeycomb won’t be out for a couple more weeks!