Modders Get Honeycomb Running On NookColor

Tweet

Yeah, we knew that Barnes & Noble’s NookColor eReader would be running Android. But did we suspect it would do this much? Modders have managed to root it, install the Android Market on it, and do all sorts of things on the device. Who knew that the little eReader would end up being such a fully fledged Android tablet? At any rate, user “deeperblue” from  the XDA developers forum has managed to Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” running on the device. Honeycomb is, of course, the “tablet optimized” version of Android that Google has been promising.

Google released the SDK for the Honeycomb, but has yet to release the full source code of the operating system. But that hasn’t stopped deeperblue from porting the tablet OS to the NookColor. As often happens with these sorts of ports, at first, it was a bit buggy, with touch input not even responding, according to the heroic modder. You can imagine that once the source code is released, we’ll see more progress. Deeperblue did report that he recently got touchscreen input working on the device, but most other features on the device still aren’t working.

I saw the Motorola Xoom at the Moto booth at CES and Gingerbread looked nowhere near finished. At the press conference, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha said that we couldn’t use them because “the software wasn’t finished” and on the show floor and press hands-on areas, it was just running a video of Google’s Android 3.0 concept UI. Because of that, I assumed it would be months before we would see Gingerbread come out.  I mean really, it looked like vaporware.

Anyway, Google did release the SDK a few days ago, and now the modding community is starting to mess with it, so I guess it’s real.