Nook Color Hacked, Turned Into In-Dash Car Stereo System [Barnes And Noble's eReader Nook Has Strange New Applications With a Little Engineering]

Posted on TFTS by Steve Anderson on Friday, 25. February 2011 under: Cars, Portable Technology, Transportation Tech

Chances are, when you think of a Nook, your first thought is not of driving down city streets at night with Phil Collins shrieking “In the Air Tonight” with Genesis. But now, as one particularly enterprising soul has discovered, your Nook Color has a lot more use than you might think, and can in fact serve as an in-dash car stereo system.

A user going by the name of juicedigital managed to take his (I’m guessing his, here, it could be a woman doing this) Nook Color and convert it to a stereo system. Basically, the Nook Color in question has been rooted so that it can run Android apps. And when you look further at the conversion process, you discover that, now, this Nook Color is briefly shown running Google Maps. We’ve heard before about Nook Colors running Android apps–this is hardly anything new–but people who’ve seen juicedigital’s mod in action are noticing something. If you were to take, say, a cell phone that has a GPS function, and pair it to the Nook Color via Bluetooth, you could get that in-dash stereo Nook Color to also serve as an in-dash GPS. And what’s even more interesting, you might think the Nook Color doesn’t have Bluetooth…but it does. It’s got a dormant Bluetooth module, the method for activating same has already been discovered by other modders.

Naturally, Barnes and Noble isn’t suggesting you do this, but they’re not suggesting you don’t, either, staying relatively mum on the concept of rooting the Nook Color. And I can see where they likely wouldn’t care, probably thinking it all for the best that people find more uses for the Nook Color so that, in turn, they will buy more of them. And discovering that people can turn their Nook Color into a car stereo? Well, that might get some people who were formerly on the fence between Kindle and Nook squarely into Team Nook.

Though if you’re not interested in turning your Nook into a stereo, well, don’t worry–there will be something for you too coming up: an official firmware upgrade that gives you access to an app store. Though just when that will hit is as yet quite unclear, so keep it here for the latest.

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