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By Coldbird
See this post as my private little review of the Nook Color, a E-Reader from Barnes & Noble that, to my surprise, becomes more awesome with every passing day.
Barnes & Noble, in it's desperate fight against Amazon and it's Kindle Series started it's own brand of E-Readers, consisting of E-Ink Readers and LCD Readers, the Nook Color belongs to the second group mentioned.
While I got it for reading Mangas and my Books, it soon dawned on me that maybe one could make something more out of it, so - I googled - and found what I needed quickly.
So, what makes the Nook Color more than just a E-Reader? It's architecture!
Never have I seen a officially released tablet with MicroSD Boot-Support that wasn't heavily locked down, sign-checked or whatever. The Nook Color does.
Sadly, Barnes & Noble undid this wonderful feature in the Nook Color 2 (Nook Tablet), a real shame, but back to topic.
Basically this means, you can boot whatever you like on this thing without the fear of bricking (permanently destroying) the device due to malfunctional software, this freedom of trial and error seems to have spawned a big fanbase for this E-Reader which, when we face things the way they are, equals a full fledged Tablet way more than a E-Reader.
This in turn spawned a lot of fan-based projects to turn this thing into a lot of cool stuff it wasn't ment to be, to name the things that sparked my personal interest...
Making it a full fledged Android Tablet (2.3.7 via Cyanogenmod or 3.1 via Honeycomb)
Making it a full fledged Ubuntu Linux Tablet (Via Chroot or Native Boot from SD Card)
It's as easy as running a script on your PC to make a SD card bootable, plugging it into your Nook Color and reboot it, voila - all running.
A long story short... I now use it as a Ubuntu Linux Tablet to do my usual J-Downloader downloads without having to have a 750 Watt Desktop running all night, saving me a lot of electricity costs...
And for my casual browsing, E-Book Reading, Manga Reading, and so on... 2.3.7 Cyanogenmod Android does the job.
And the best thing about it... you can get it refurbished from Barnes & Noble for $119...
Honestly... getting a tablet computer was never cheaper.
See this post as my private little review of the Nook Color, a E-Reader from Barnes & Noble that, to my surprise, becomes more awesome with every passing day.
Barnes & Noble, in it's desperate fight against Amazon and it's Kindle Series started it's own brand of E-Readers, consisting of E-Ink Readers and LCD Readers, the Nook Color belongs to the second group mentioned.
While I got it for reading Mangas and my Books, it soon dawned on me that maybe one could make something more out of it, so - I googled - and found what I needed quickly.
So, what makes the Nook Color more than just a E-Reader? It's architecture!
Never have I seen a officially released tablet with MicroSD Boot-Support that wasn't heavily locked down, sign-checked or whatever. The Nook Color does.
Sadly, Barnes & Noble undid this wonderful feature in the Nook Color 2 (Nook Tablet), a real shame, but back to topic.
Basically this means, you can boot whatever you like on this thing without the fear of bricking (permanently destroying) the device due to malfunctional software, this freedom of trial and error seems to have spawned a big fanbase for this E-Reader which, when we face things the way they are, equals a full fledged Tablet way more than a E-Reader.
This in turn spawned a lot of fan-based projects to turn this thing into a lot of cool stuff it wasn't ment to be, to name the things that sparked my personal interest...
Making it a full fledged Android Tablet (2.3.7 via Cyanogenmod or 3.1 via Honeycomb)
Making it a full fledged Ubuntu Linux Tablet (Via Chroot or Native Boot from SD Card)
It's as easy as running a script on your PC to make a SD card bootable, plugging it into your Nook Color and reboot it, voila - all running.
A long story short... I now use it as a Ubuntu Linux Tablet to do my usual J-Downloader downloads without having to have a 750 Watt Desktop running all night, saving me a lot of electricity costs...
And for my casual browsing, E-Book Reading, Manga Reading, and so on... 2.3.7 Cyanogenmod Android does the job.
And the best thing about it... you can get it refurbished from Barnes & Noble for $119...
Honestly... getting a tablet computer was never cheaper.