It’s hard to not love Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color , especially in case you are amongst those who’d rather take a look at text on a high quality backlit screen than an e-paper display. Not just did we benefit from the e-book reader once we first reviewed it , however keeps recuperating because of updates to its hidden Android core plus the hot addition of its own app store complete with Pandora and Angry Birds. And while there’s also a respectable bundled web browser and music player, it isn’t the software that we adore the main — it is the hardware, and especially the cost proposition.
See, $250 ($200 on sale) buys you a good looking 7-inch 1024×600 pixel capacitive IPS panel with excellent contrast and viewing angles, an 800MHz TI OMAP 3621 CPU, a PowerVR SGX 530 GPU, 512MB RAM, WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth, 8GB of built-in storage, an accelerometer, and a microSD card slot — all wrapped in a fascinating 12mm thin package. Sure, there is not any 3G radio, no camera, no microphone, no ambient light sensor, and no haptic feedback, but despite its lower-end specs, the Nook Color just begs to be become an entire blown Android tablet.
And that is just what we did, by installing CyanogenMod 7 on Barnes & Noble’s color reader, complete with Android 2.3.3 ( Gingerbread ) and the complete suite of Google apps. Check out our screenshots gallery below and hit the break for our hands-on video and impressions.
We’ll let the video above speak for itself, however the takeaway here it that CyanogenMod 7 at the Nook Color is surprisingly fast and pleasantly functional. Everything works most often as expected with remarkably little (if any) lag. Surfing the online is snappy for an 800 MHz tablet and includes Flash support — the CPU even handles 720p video decoding without drama. For an additional dose of irony, we installed the 3 Kindle 3 and Nook apps. Both work, but there are some bugs, and the latter won’t support a few of the interactive content that’s normally readable at the Nook Color, just like the Elephant’s Child. Regardless, we’d haven’t any qualms lending the hacked tablet to non tech-savvy friends.
The stairs required to put in CyanogenMod 7 at the Nook Color are reasonably simple and are outlined within the source links below — just follow the instructions within the YouTube videos (there’s one for PC users and one for Mac users). Happy modding!
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