looking for advice, new to tablets but willing to learn

[chibae]

Okay..quick bit of background. I have been a long time three device user..blackberry phone, palm pilot and laptop. The palm pilot is dying, the blackberry is about to be replaced by a "droid" phone and I have decided I want a tablet, Hey I deserve one.

The one thing that has held me back was cost. The latest adds for the Kindle Fire inspired me to start looking at ebook readers, 7" tablets, etc. Sooo, now for what I want. Preferably under $300.00.

I want a tablet that I can use for light web use; email, surfing, forums. I also want a good image viewer for photos that I have loaded from my computer, expandable storage such as SD or microSD cards, usb commection and wi-fi.I also want an e-book reader. Bluetooth would be nice but not a deal breaker.

The Fire originally caught my eye but the more I read about it the less appealing I found it.

That led me to the Nook Color. It seems perfect except for two things.

1. I currently run Docs to Go on both my phone and my palm pilot. Although I can live without excell and power point in a tablet, I really want to be able to run a program/app compatable with MS Word.
2. I really don't want to be tied down to only one e-book source.

Would rooting a Nook Color solve either of these issues? if so can someone please point me to a rooting tutorial.

 

[dvdcatalyst]

The NOOKcolor is a bit limited due to the modified Android gui of B&N, but it is one of the most "moddable" tablets around. It actually had Honeycomb on it before the Xoom was released.
Many nook users are running it with a N2A CM7 SD card, which basically dual-boots your NOOK into Gingerbread, a full, unrestricted Android experience.

If you simply root the NOOK, you can install apps from the Android market, but I think the CM7 way on it would make you quite happy with it.

The one gripe about the NOOKcolor is the lack of buttons. With Honeycomb, the buttons are on-screen, so that works fine, however all other Android versions rely on hardware-buttons to access things like settings and such. Because the nook just has power, volume and a home button, the back and settings buttons are implemented using a software overlay app.

 

[chibae]

Thank you. i've followed up with research specfic to rooted nook colors and that leads to another question. Is the android os running only when the microSD card is inserted? if so can the internal memory of the device still be accessed?

 

[TheDroid13]

I believe that the nook is always running android. Barnes and noble just has their own custom firmware running over the top.

Sent from my GT-P1000 using Android Tablet Forum

 

[dvdcatalyst]

Thank you. i've followed up with research specfic to rooted nook colors and that leads to another question. Is the android os running only when the microSD card is inserted? if so can the internal memory of the device still be accessed?

The NOOKcolor can dual-boot. It is build so it will boot from an SD card first when you turn it on (which makes it virtually unbrickable). N2A is basically a live-boot SD card of Android. When you turn your nook on with the sd in it, it will boot N2A (or CM7) and if you turn the nook on without it, it will be running the NOOK's Android version. The N2A Android boot can access the NOOKcolor's internal memory, so you can access files and such on that, but due to the formatting of the later releases of N2A, it doesn't work in reverse. You can not access the files on the N2A sd card when you are booted in the B&N size.

If you are happy with N2A or a different Android SD version (if you are up for it, you can create your own Android SD card) you can visit XDA for instructions on how to actually flash it to your NOOK so that it will replace the original NOOK version. This tends to work a bit faster, and of course you get to use the full capacity of the SD card as well.