Barnes & Noble soon to add more tablet functionality to Nook Color

Chris Meadows, TeleRead:: "Barnes & Noble has announced a big update for the Nook Color e-reader coming in April which will include a number of new functions such as applications and email, essentially bringing the LCD e-reader closer to being a full-fledged Android tablet. ... "

Nook Color Android app store coming in April along with Flash support

Crave - CNET: "While plenty of people have "rooted" their Nook Colors with custom firmware that allows them to access the Android Market and download applications, most Nook Color buyers have stuck with the official firmware that came with the device. If you're in the latter group, you'll be happy to note that you'll soon have access to Barnes & Noble's version of an app store, which is due to launch in April, according to the HSN Web Site, where the Nook is being sold for $299.90."

Barnes & Noble/Spring Design settle lawsuit over Nook feature

Yahoo! Finance: "NEW YORK (Reuters) - Barnes & Noble Inc has settled a lawsuit brought against it by Spring Design, which had accused the top U.S. bookseller of illegally copying a screen design for its popular Nook electronic book reader. Under terms of the agreement, Spring is granting Barnes & Noble a non-exclusive license for all of its patents and patent applications. Other terms of the settlement were not disclosed."

Nook Color Honeycomb 'beta' hack advances | Crave - CNET

Carnoy, CNET: "A couple of weeks ago, I posted something on how an industrious Android enthusiast, who goes by the handle deeper-blue on the xdadevelopers' forum, had hacked or 'rooted' the Nook Color to run a preview version of Honeycomb. At the time, we were looking at a pretty crude port that was missing a lot of Honeycomb's core features. But since then, some improvements have been made, giving 'rooters' hope that the slightly underpowered Nook Color might be able to handle Google's Android 3.0 operating system for tablets without running too sluggishly. Several videos of "HoneyNook" in action have cropped up in recent days, including the embedded video from Noah at TechnoBuffalo, who credits the newer NookHoney port to deeper-dev. More recently, David Cogen at theunlockr.com put together his own NookHoney demo complete with a background soundtrack. His assessment: "Not bad for a $250 tablet running beta software...it can only get better." (Note: Cogen is running the Honeycomb port from the internal memory, which works better and has the Android Market, but is harder to undo)."

Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) ported to Nook Color with hardware acceleration

Geek.com: "For those who don’t know, the Nook Color (from Barnes & Noble) started life as a simple color e-book reader, but back in December last year an XDA-developer member hacked the device to unlock its true potential. However, last Friday witnessed a new milestone for the tablet/e-reader with news that a port of Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) has been successfully transferred to the Nook Color. ... "

B&N's Nooknewstand (the Combo of Nookmagazine & Nooknewspaper) a Success Thus Far

Readers get here what they can't on iPad: subscriptions. Crave - CNET: In a press release, Barnes & Noble says, 'Digital periodical sales are exceeding expectations with more than 650,000 total subscriptions and single copy sales driven by Nook Color customers reading interactive versions of all of their favorite newspapers and magazines ... .'"

Barnes & Noble Update 1.1.0 for Nook Color

AndroidOS.in: "Barnes & Noble has released the update version 1.1.0 for Nook Color Android tablet. It is no FroYo update, but it comes with several bug fixes including improved Wi-Fi connectivity. ... "

Digital Subscription Numbers from Barnes & Noble

PW: "Barnes & Noble ... said since the launch of the Nookcolor it has sold more than 650,000 total subscriptions and single copy sales of digital editions of newspapers and magazines. Since Christmas Day customers have already ordered 150% more subscriptions than the total number sold over the entire previous 12 months, B&N said."

Nook Color Gets Hacked Again, Now Runs Ubuntu Linux

Elizabeth Fish, PC World: "CES certainly didn’t put the XDA Developers forum users off from their usual tinkering. Ever since first getting jailbroken, the Nook Color has had plenty of hacker’s attention, mainly getting Android and Angry Birds (and then potentially blowing up). Now, hackers have moved their focus from Android to Ubuntu Linux. ... "

eBooks Outsell Paper Books On Barnes & Noble's Online Store

Riggio & colleagues better enjoy themselves and get the most out of the moment, now that the Nook Color has been rooted to run Android apps, including Kindle for Android. They could not foresee this? HuffPost: "The New York company said its Nookcolor e-reader, which launched eight weeks before Christmas, was its top-selling gift of the holiday season. Barnes & Noble also said it now sells more digital books than physical books on its Web site. Nearly 1 million e-books were purchased on Christmas Day alone, the company said, with popular titles including James Patterson's Cross Fire and Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." Wow, what great results. But imagine how many more books they would have sold on Christmas day if their servers hadn't crashed.

How To Run Android Apps, Including Kindle, On A (Rooted) Nook

San Francisco Chronicle: "If you got a Nook Color instead of a Kindle 3 for Christmas and you're feeling left out, have no fear: a simple hack posted by Blog Kindle lets your Nook read books in Amazon's Kindle format...and run just about any other Android application as well. The hack works because the Nook is actually a bare-bones Android tablet that automatically starts the Nook application and doesn't let you run any other Android apps. But users can download a rootkit that overrides the Nook's presets, then enable the Android Market and go to town."

B&N’s Nook Servers Crash Christmas Day

The Digital Reader: "Interesting story today. B&N didn’t bother to keep track how many Nooks they sold this holiday season. The B&N servers that are supposed to support downloading eBooks and Nook activation crashed on Christmas ... How could they have allowed this to happen? Seriously, folks, they should have seen it coming months ago. Count how many Nooks are sold, and subtract the number that get activated right away. You’ll be left with an approximate number of Nooks that will be activated right after Christmas. It’s not rocket science. ... "

Color E-Readers Open Way for Picture Books

NYTimes: " ... publishers are making headway in converting their enormous libraries of illustrated titles to e-books, hoping to capitalize on the growing popularity of the Apple iPad and the Nook Color and their ability to showcase books with color photographs and illustrations. Apple said Tuesday that it was set to make a major push into illustrated books on Wednesday, introducing more than 100 titles to its iBookstore, an assortment of children’s books, photography books and cookbooks."

Nook Color Hacked into a Cheap Tablet

Techtree: "... considering the open source origins of the underlying Android platform, the dormant power of Nook Color's hardware didn't lay unutilised for long. Users had already started rooting, that is gaining Super User privileges to override the Nook UI, their Nook Color to eke out full functionality. In a latest development, the e-reader has been hacked to run Android 2.2.1. What that means is your Nook Color now gets a home screen and the ability to launch Android applications right off the bat. It also gets the phone icon in the process, but that's moot considering it lacks the communication hardware to make and receive calls. ..."

Inventec to Ship a Million Nook Colors Before Year's End

TechEye: "It appears that Inventec’s Nook Color touch controlled e-book readers have been something of a success, with over a million expected to have shipped to Barnes & Noble in 2010. It was only released in mid November, having been announced in late October, but apparently the pester power of over a million kids has paid off, or perhaps parents are trying to attempting to purchase an educational Christmas present rather than Call of Duty Black Ops for their wee'uns. Inventec is also expected to land orders for 6-7 million Palm WebOS-based tablet telecommunication devices from HP next year, according to sources close to Digitimes."

The Nook Color has been Rooted

Geek *dot* com: "While everyone waits for the procession of good Android tablets to arrive, Barnes & Noble had one already on the market in the form of the Nook Color, but limited it to only being a color e-reader. That is until someone figured out to root it, unlocking the full potential of this now tablet device. With an ARM Cortex A8 800MHz processor at its heart, the Nook Color certainly has the power to become a great tablet. As Matt Miller has already shown, it’s great for playing video, so why not for playing games? Well, as you’d expect, one of the first things those applying this rooting solution did was to get Angry Birds running."

Nook Color Commercial

Barnes & Noble has released a new television ad for the Nook Color.

New Street's "A CHRISTMAS CAROL Retold in the Manner of Ernest Hemingway" Launched for Kindle and Nook

"Papa" and Charles Dickens announce the debut of their new collaboration, just in time for the Holidaze.

Nook Color Debuts - Early Reviews are Mixed

DailyTech delivers a good rundown on all the late-breaking Nook Color reviews. " ... problems ... abound. The music player is reportedly hard to use and doesn't automatically recognize newly added songs until you reset. The web browser doesn't support pinch-zoom and breaks on many sites (including those that use Flash). Supported audio and video formats are limited. The device can play movies on YouTube -- but only at the lowest resolution. Reviewers praised the inclusion of an Microsoft Office-document viewer (.ppt, .doc), which was a bit slow but got the job done. They also said the PDF reader was superb. Despite being an Android tablet, the Nook Color does not support the Android Market. Reviewers were baffled by this. Engadget recalls playing Angry Birds seamlessly on a demo unit. Clearly this would have multiplied the value of the tablet greatly, but perhaps Barnes & Noble was afraid of muddling a cohesive e-book reader experience. Whatever the justification, the reviews agree that the lack of apps greatly hurt the device."

Linux e-Readers are Evolving into Android-Tablets - Computerworld Blogs

Computerworld Blogs: "Sources at Amazon tell me that the company will indeed produce a mass-market Android tablet. I can't tell you its size, pricing, when it's expected to ship, or anything else of substance. The one thing I do know is that, like the Kindle, it will run Linux with a Java-based interface. In short, this new tablet Kindle, let's call it 'KinTablet,' will run Android. Amazon developers are already working on an app store for this new device. Based on the wording of the developer agreement, I suspect Amazon might even launch the KinTablet in time for the 2010 holiday season. We already know that Barnes & Noble is releasing their Nook take on a tablet, the Nook Color, on Nov. 19. Anybody want to bet me that Amazon will announce their next step Kindle on the same day or the day before? Will these hurt iPad sales? I doubt it."