While the general populous have been salivating over the stupidly-named Motorola Xoom, those faithful hackers over at XDA Developers have taken the SDK image of Honeycomb – the tablet-centric flavour of Android – and ported it to the hackers best friend, the Nook Color. Or, as we call it in the UK, the Nook Colour.
The relatively run-of-the-mill architecture of the Nook (an off-the-shelf Texas Instruments OMAP processor at its core), decent hardware quality and cheap price make it the ideal hackers plaything. The device’s popularity as a tablet rather than an eReader has been such that rumours began to circulate that Barnes & Noble (the Nook’s manufacturer) was preparing a vanilla build of Android for would-be tinkerers to install should they wish. Ultimately these rumours have yet to amount to anything, but we live in hope. After Christmas Barnes & Noble announced the Nook Color was their best-selling product of all time, cementing the 7″ device as a consumer favourite.
Meanwhile, the clever fellows on the XDA forums have been finding increasingly varied uses for the device, first getting Froyo running, then Ubuntu, and now Honeycomb.
Currently the only major omission from the build is sound, which is still a work in progress. Graphics acceleration, Wifi, hardware buttons and accelerometer support are all there, making this one of the most usable pre-release hacks we’ve seen to date – you don’t even need any command line hi-jinx, just write the image to a MicroSD card and you’re good to go. Obviously, it still has its problems – some users are reporting crashes here and there.
So if you don’t want to wait an indeterminate amount of time for a $700+ Honeycomb tablet, head down to your local Barnes & Noble now for a $250 alternative.
UPDATE: Having installed Honeycomb on my own Nook, I can confirm it is fairly shaky in parts. The settings screen in particular is fairly prone to crashing (most likely because it houses all sorts of settings that have no hardware to go with them, like GPS or 3G settings). That said, the browser is a complete joy compared to the standard 2.1 Browser that ships with the Nook, and the new keyboard is really solid.
If a cobbled-together preview build is running this well, I can’t wait to see what the final version is like.
