The Barnes & Noble NOOKcolor is a 7 inch eBook reader with a 1024 x 600 pixel LCD color display. It runs Google Android and sells for $249, making it a relatively affordable Android tablet. The only problem (for people wanting to use it as an all-purpose tablet) is that out of the box it only runs a few apps including the Barnes & Noble eBook software and a web browser.
But the folks at the xda-developers forum have figured out how to gain root access to the NOOKcolor, which lets you install third party apps, and possibly eventually install custom firmware making all sorts of changes.
I suspect that for now, you’re still better off getting a tablet that was meant to run third party apps if that’s what you’re looking for. At the very least, I suspect you’ll void your warranty if you break anything while tinkering around with a rooted NOOKcolor. Still, this opens the door to a lot of interesting possibilities. I mean come on… that’s Angry Birds in the photo… on an eBook reader!
You can find another photo of a rooted NOOKcolor after the break.
via Gizmodo
+ 1, agreed. This is very promising! I recall reading that the internals of this device are decent for a general purpose tablet, but not quite up to the Galaxy Tab specs. But for $250, I would gladly make that tradeoff. Plus, I think it has the potential to have a much broader install base than any other Android tablet, so even without rooting I hope we’ll see some great Android apps ported to it.
Excellent. Now we just need to get CM on there! Heh. I wouldn’t mind seeing some benchmarks for this thing in the meantime.