The Nook Color May very well be a much better Android Tablet Than We Thought [Nook Color]

The Nook Color’s built on top of Android, but seemed limited in its potential to be a killer Android tablet by the manner it’d run apps. Well, the truth is, it can be a solid little Android tablet in spite of everything.

At the Nook Color announcement, Barnes & Noble wasn’t super clear about how apps and its own app store would work in the case of the larger Android ecosystem and Market. But now that we’ve talked to them concerning the development program a bit more intensive , things look peachier.

Barnes & Noble is going to run their own app store for the Nook Color, distributing and selling applications. It’s a ” curated” experience, meaning they’ll must approve apps for the store, which developers can start submitting in ” early 2011,” with apps approved ” within weeks” of submission. So the apps that we saw at the launch, like Pandora, is all that’ll be available for a few months. (They won’t disclose how they’re splitting revenue with developers but said they’re using a ” familiar” scheme, so the usual 70/30 probably applies.)

The Nook Color won’t run apps straight out of the Android Market, but that doesn’t mean it could’t run them-actually, they’ve done plenty of tests on apps from standard Android smartphones and they ” quite often run on Nook Color,” which has Android 2.1 under the hood. (The Nook’s native interface and apps are just standard Android application layers.) Barnes & Noble’s special Nook SDK runs on top of the same old Android one, and offers developers access to exclusive extensions and APIs for the Nook and its interface. So porting Android apps isn’t difficult. B&N says it’s more like ” optimizing” them for Nook than porting them.

While Barnes & Noble really doesn’t want the Nook Color ” to be perceived as a multipurpose device,” and their goal is to ” extend the reading experience through applications,” their definition of apps that do this is very elastic. If truth be told, they don’t must be text-y at all. I posited a Netflix or other video service app, and B&N’s Claudia Romanini said they’d probably fly. ” Is it attached to a book? Maybe not. But once I’m watching content, I’m searching for multiple touch points. The elemental question B&N is looking of apps is, ” Would that reading user be excited about consuming that content?”

Frankly, most of what I take advantage of my iPad for is reading-RSS, books, newspapers, email-and Netflix. If the Nook Color can deliver that in a slick way, well, that’s all I truly want out of an Android tablet. But due to the fact it’s plain ol’ Android underneath, I won’t be surprised when the more enterprising Android nerds make it capable of doing various other things too.

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This post is tagged: application layers, barnes noble, Developers, native interface, reading experience, smartphones