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Can't post links but go look the smartphonemag website and look up an article by Steve Green dated 8th of Dec. Says he spoke to a B&N rep who showed him a test OS running on a Nook Color. Had Android 2.2 with official android market (which had certain apps removed [I imagine things like GPS apps will be gone]). The rep also said it addressed battery issues and performance issues. The new OS even uses the normal android home screen and you switch into the Nook UI when you want to read books etc...
Hell yehs if its true.
EDIT: Oh and the B&N rep said they were aiming for January 2011 for release.
Please check for news already posted, 5 threads down:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=872736
Yeah I've seen it now, can a mod please delete my thread
Does anyone know when Barnes and Noble will drop the official Froyo update for the Nook Color? Back in December every tech site was saying it was due in January, but that obviously did not happen. I am trying to decide whether to root mine now or wait for the official OS update before I start messing with my NC. Thanks
brendan6q66 said:
Does anyone know when Barnes and Noble will drop the official Froyo update for the Nook Color? Back in December every tech site was saying it was due in January, but that obviously did not happen. I am trying to decide whether to root mine now or wait for the official OS update before I start messing with my NC. Thanks
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Click to collapse
I wouldnt ever expect it officially. Most of these rumors started with nameless sources, and employee talk. They also made the claim that we would have the appstore but we know how that went. As many have stated, the nook is an E-Reader first. It doesn't need anything past what it has now, to do what its designed to do.
I still think B&N is working on their app store. It's an opportunity to make more money. How long it will take to get released, who knows.
Ultimately I think it depends on what you're looking for in the software. Even if B&N updates it to 2.2 it won't be the same look and feel you get on other android devices. I don't think it's going to happen that they release a software update that upgrades this thing from an e-reader to a tablet pc. The talks are they'll incorporate some customized market for software in an update, so maybe we get the android market, but probably just some bastardized form of it. I think if you want a true tablet experience with the NC, you'll never get that without rooting it. Don't think of it as a Froyo update, but rather a NC update, if it comes from B&N. Just the same e-reader with a different foundation.
there is no consequences of rooting your nook. you can always flash your nook back to stock. thay being said i would suggest you try nookie froyo. even if froyo DOES come out from B&N there is no gurantee it will give the full tablet experience that AOSP froyo does.
I realize the update was never intended to bring the full 2.2 experience to the NC, but i had heard that it would offer more or less the homescreen experience along with a curated B&N app store. I just think this thing has so much more potential then B&N is currently offering on it. I think it is in dire need of more basic stock apps such as email, a calendar, calculator, etc. I bring my NC with me everywhere... classes, on the subway. I think the addition of these apps would make it a complete device rather than just an e-reader. And it is not just an ereader... that designation went out the window the second it got that beautiful color display. Also, I think 3rd party apps like dropbox, instapaper, and an rss reader that syncs to google reader would be amazing on the NC. I realize I can get all of this by rooting, but I would feel much more comfortable if they were eventually offered by B&N
brendan6q66 said:
I realize the update was never intended to bring the full 2.2 experience to the NC, but i had heard that it would offer more or less the homescreen experience along with a curated B&N app store. I just think this thing has so much more potential then B&N is currently offering on it. I think it is in dire need of more basic stock apps such as email, a calendar, calculator, etc. I bring my NC with me everywhere... classes, on the subway. I think the addition of these apps would make it a complete device rather than just an e-reader. And it is not just an ereader... that designation went out the window the second it got that beautiful color display. Also, I think 3rd party apps like dropbox, instapaper, and an rss reader that syncs to google reader would be amazing on the NC. I realize I can get all of this by rooting, but I would feel much more comfortable if they were eventually offered by B&N
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Click to collapse
Look, if I burn the desk I'm sitting at and I find that it burns well, that doesn't mean the company that makes it actually makes firewood. If by "complete device" you mean a tablet pc, then B&N could have released it as such when it first came out. But what you're refusing to acknowledge is that this thing wasn't created for that, however capable it may be. At this point all I've heard is we may get some form of a software market, which doesn't need a kernel update from 2.1 to 2.2, so even with that, we may not get an android update. Like I said, just stop thinking that, because this can be an effective tablet, B&N will go out of their way to make it one. For that matter, you shouldn't expect it to have the look of an android device any more than it currently does. It seems to me that B&N would be pretty particular about the appearance of their software.
Listen, just wait it out if you don't want to root the thing. Maybe they will give us a decent app list, and maybe it won't take forever and a day to get to us. But don't expect them to offer any software from a competitor, or book/magazine/newspaper reading software that doesn't require you get the material from them.
At the end of the day, BN would be insane to release a full fledged version of the market onto the NC. The absolute last thing they want is Amazon, Borders and others competing with them on their own platform. I think we will see a market of some sort released down the road. When I don't know, but I'd be surprised if we never see one. BN intends for this thing to just be an e-reader. They don't want people to buy it and use it as a tablet. They want it to be an e-reader because it's then basically tied to their store for content. That is what they want.
Second Tuesday in the first week of June
March 7th. Note no year specified.
February 31st
How would we know?
Nobody knows. Just speculation and guesses out there.
"When it's ready."
That's the only answer I would actually believe, and even then I'm not inclined to accept it as truth.
What if they are planning to go straight to HoneyComb?
Holy ****! It never ends
V.A.T.Juice said:
What if they are planning to go straight to HoneyComb?
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Click to collapse
In what ways will Honeycomb make the NC a better ereader for B&N-purchased ebooks?
The only reason I believe they would even go to an underlying 2.2 is for Flash. I could imagine them coming out with some very cool eReader applications for it such as in-magazine videos and other book/magazine related media features like that. It's a very capable little device and I positively love mine, but I feel like there are many people buying it as a $250 Galaxy Tab competitor, and it's simply not. The community here is great and tons of people are doing absolutely outstanding work unlocking a wealth of potential, but at the end of the day we will never get fully featured android support from B&N and it would be silly to expect it.
miemens said:
The only reason I believe they would even go to an underlying 2.2 is for Flash. I could imagine them coming out with some very cool eReader applications for it such as in-magazine videos and other book/magazine related media features like that. It's a very capable little device and I positively love mine, but I feel like there are many people buying it as a $250 Galaxy Tab competitor, and it's simply not. The community here is great and tons of people are doing absolutely outstanding work unlocking a wealth of potential, but at the end of the day we will never get fully featured android support from B&N and it would be silly to expect it.
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Click to collapse
Exactly right, it won't be supported as a tablet. If/when someone cooks up a rom for this thing based on honeycomb, it'll be the same as autonooter and nookie froyo now. What I mean is we'll get a device that reports itself as some other device, the xoom or some other thing, just so the market has an idea of what apps we should have available. But they'll have such higher powered tablets with better cpu's and more ram, better screens, and they'll have nifty docks and bluetooth attachments, and we'll be luck if someone just gets our bluetooth runnning smoothly.
Once they get the textbook thing straightened out, do you think they might need flash for streaming classes? I know some unis have classes where you can either attend virtually or at least replay lectures.
Homer
Okay gang - here's a twist for you...
On the Nook Facebook page, they posted this on March 24th:
You asked, we listened. This spring, use your NOOK Color to send e-mail and explore popular apps like Angry Birds, Drawing Pad, Lonely Planet Phrasebooks, and Wine PhD. Stay tuned here for news about these exciting new features and when the firmware update will be ready. (P.S. Yes! We said Angry Birds!) What apps would you love to see on your NOOK Color?
Now - go take a gander at Drawing Pad - the minimum is Android 3.0.
Hmmmmm.....
Very, very unlikely. The Nook does not meet the hardware requirements mandated by Google.
http://www.mytabletlife.com/2011/04/15/google-hardware-requirements-honeycomb/
Those min requirements arent from google, they were stated by lg I think it was as an excuse not to update their products.
Sent from my HTC Glacier using XDA Premium App
Honeycomb isn't really ready at this point (Xoom aside). It's been announced several times that the update will be Froyo, although Gingerbread would be nice (but there is always CM7 for that).
the B&N update may just be 2.1
On Apr 6, BN posted this on the Nook developer site:
"What version of Android is supported for development?
Simon Walker posted this on Apr-06 18:43
Your application should be optimized for Google Android SDK Platform 2.1 API 7"
This would imply that the update is a most likely a patch with a very restrictive BN apps market.
However, some very smart guys on XDA think that it's 2.2.
fpga_guy said:
On Apr 6, BN posted this on the Nook developer site:
"What version of Android is supported for development?
Simon Walker posted this on Apr-06 18:43
Your application should be optimized for Google Android SDK Platform 2.1 API 7"
This would imply that the update is a most likely a patch with a very restrictive BN apps market.
However, some very smart guys on XDA think that it's 2.2.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
the reason why people believe it to be 2.2 is because b&n have announced that it will have flash support along with the b&n market.
knaries2000 said:
the reason why people believe it to be 2.2 is because b&n have announced that it will have flash support along with the b&n market.
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Click to collapse
BN has NOT announced. Perhaps you can provide a link to the BN announcement. HSN is NOT BN. In fact, HSN has removed flash from their NC ads.
Has everybody noticed how this has slipped thru the cracks with all the distraction of Google I/O 2011 news?
Google I/O Google has said that the next version of Android, dubbed "Ice Cream Sandwich", will be open sourced "by the end of the year," and that it will not open source the current Android incarnation, the tablet-centric Honeycomb, before that time.
Source:
UU UU UU dot theregister.co.uk/2011/05/10/android_ice_cream_sandwich/
Andy Rubin has backtracked on making the Honeycomb source available until after it is no longer relevant (if even then). There is no promise any more of EVER getting the Honeycomb source, so it looks like the best we'll be able to do is SDK11 unless B&N updates stock to Honeycomb (don't hold your breath).
I wouldn't say Honeycomb will no longer be relevant after ICS. After all, ICS is a smart phone OS, whereas HC is designed for tablets. What I'm getting from this is that ICS is basically going to be the smartphone version of HC. Google has stated that they don't want people porting HC to smartphones. By delaying the release of source for HC until after ICS hits the shelves, Google is trying to forestall the translation of HC to phones by waiting to release HC code until it no longer makes sense to do so (beacuse there'll be no point in doing so).
dsf3g said:
I wouldn't say Honeycomb will no longer be relevant after ICS. After all, ICS is a smart phone OS, whereas HC is designed for tablets. What I'm getting from this is that ICS is basically going to be the smartphone version of HC. Google has stated that they don't want people porting HC to smartphones. By delaying the release of source for HC until after ICS hits the shelves, Google is trying to forestall the translation of HC to phones by waiting to release HC code until it no longer makes sense to do so (beacuse there'll be no point in doing so).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Actually, from the presentation, ICS is just as much for tablets, since the UI is supposed to scale based on the device.
However, they keep saying ICS for quarter 4, which is half a year away. Frankly, i am pissed that they yanked devs around for so long HOPING we might see the code, when in reality, i have no doubt they held it back solely on the request of Moto and others, to help maintain a monopoly on HC market..
Other media reports are characterizing the discussion as Rubin saying that they will never release the Honeycomb AOSP. Yet another reason to ignore the Xoom, et al. tablets if they're going to pull this bull****.
Brilliant plan -- release a closed buggy version, refuse the community to do de-bugging work for free and then hope that it will be magically fixed by merging with the OS that originally was thought to not be up to snuff.
Google thinks that they can "merge" Honeycomb back into Ice Cream Sandwich (after they "get it right").
What I want to know is, how is Andy Rubin justifying withholding the source of an "open source" OS? And what is to keep him from doing the same thing again next year with ICS?
There are more comments over in the developer thread on this subject. I started this one first, but I don't have enough posts to start one over there (grumble, grumble). I'm slowly getting closer to being able to post there though (grin).
One school of thought over there is that the Honeycomb AOSP is a hacked up kludge "not ready for primetime" and that's why Google doesn't want it out.
While that is very likely true and (and will probably continue to be true now that 3.1 is released), that is no justification for opposing "opening" the source.
Since I expect the kludges will be "grandfathered" throughout future releases, I don't expect to ever see HC AOSP. I could be wrong, but it really doesn't matter because ICS will be out by then and everybody will be wanting to port to it.
What I'm concerned with is the "promise" of ICS being released in a timely fashion. Mr. Rubin has made earlier "promises" that have later been rescinded. I don't think he EVER wanted HC released and was just trying to "buy time" until Google I/O 2011 so that he could take the heat off with the announcement of ICS.
I hope I'm wrong, but ... fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice....
Divine_Madcat said:
However, they keep saying ICS for quarter 4, which is half a year away.
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Click to collapse
Fiscal, or calendar? Because fiscal Q4 is July-September.
zombieflanders said:
Fiscal, or calendar? Because fiscal Q4 is July-September.
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Click to collapse
Technically, i don't think they have said, but i have never seen any other Google release announcement refer to a fiscal quarter instead of the calendar. I would love for it to be fiscal, but that is a real pipe dream.
DM -
Tell them over in the other thread that Andy Rubin's quote was in a Q&A w/press after his keynote.
DiDGR8 said:
DM -
Tell them over in the other thread that Andy Rubin's quote was in a Q&A w/press after his keynote.
Click to expand...
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Consider it done.
Divine_Madcat said:
Consider it done.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks (just one more post and I can get into Dev!!)
After receiving a shiny used Nook Color from Ebay, I immediately flashed the latest daily of CM9 (ICE) to EMMC and played around with it for a while. I installed several "tablet" apps from the Market, and I was very impressed by the formatting and presentation.
Unfortunately, performance was marginal at best, so I decided to flash the "official stable" version of CM7. I installed the same tablet apps as before and noticed that they were not displaying in "tablet mode". Landscape, yes, but not tablet-formatted.
For example, running Pocket Informant in landscape mode in CM9 provides a nice graphical notebook-like format, but CM7 displays the same as a simple landscape calendar, much like on my DROID Bionic.
So from this, I conclude that CM9 is a "real" tablet OS, while CM7 presents the Nook Color to the apps not as a tablet but as a high-resolution phone. Can anyone else confirm this? I absolutely LOVE the performance of CM7--it really flies and is very responsive--but long for the true "tablet" functionality of CM9.
That said, I'd love some input about how landscape mode works on the OS you have installed, and what "tablet-mode" apps actually render as a tablet.
1. What version of the OS are you running?
2. What "tablet" apps are you running?
3. Of those "tablet" apps you are running, what actually render as "tablet" apps?
Thanks!
Jim Barr said:
So from this, I conclude that CM9 is a "real" tablet OS, while CM7 presents the Nook Color to the apps not as a tablet but as a high-resolution phone. Can anyone else confirm this?!
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Click to collapse
Yes, that is 100% correct. CM7 is based on Android 2.x and CM9 is based on Android 4.x. Android 2.x was designed for phones, Android 3.x was the first version to be designed with tablets in mind (and only tablets; phone functionality was stripped out), and Android 4.x folded both capabilities back into a single OS version. Because of the rush-job Google did in order to release Android 3.0 to compete with the iPad they didn't release the source code, which means it couldn't be properly ported over to the Nook Color or other Android tablets that were built with Android 2.x. However, they did release the full source code for 4.x in November which means this is the first time we have the source code for a version of Android actually designed for tablets
Because of these differences many apps have been built to require Android 3.x or higher (which includes CM9) in order to show the tablet layout. Maybe some of those are arbitrary but I'm sure others are taking advantage of system calls and/or UI calls that have only been added to the API since Android 3.x
Wait for the new hardware accelerated build fattire & co. work on right now.
It should be able to speed up things quite a bit thanks to a new SGX driver release.
It's still really early in the game. There's only one official ICS tablet out there - the Asus Transformer Prime. People were expecting many more ICS tablet announcements at CES a few weeks ago - didn't happen. I expect it's because ICS is based off of Honeycomb which didn't exactly set the world on fire and wasn't a big draw for app developers. But now that the ICS is going to be a joint phone/tablet OS - it should spark developers to greater heights. I also think the 7" form factor is going to be more and more popular also... and apps will be developed accordingly. Reader apps like Kindle look great on the nook because they were developed for the smaller form factors... others should follow suit.
Only a few games built for phone (Monopoly and some dice game the kids play are the ones that come to mind) don't render properly on the NC (running CM9). Otherwise, there are a few that won't do landscape (some of the ESPN and some cookbook apps), but I've had good luck otherwise.
Huh - Monopoly runs fine on my emmc install of the latest 2/2 nightly - and it did on the others as well...
I was playing with X-Plane on CM7 with great success. Can't wait to see if it works on the 2/2 nightly.
I agree with the OP. As I am currently going back and forth between cm7 and cm9 the apps are not responding in the same way. Perfect example is gmail. Love the interface on ICS! However, it's just not the same experience on cm7. Google's Currents is the same on both. Google Docs (the newly updated version) seems to work the same on the both as well.
Jim Barr said:
After receiving a shiny used Nook Color from Ebay, I immediately flashed the latest daily of CM9 (ICE) to EMMC and played around with it for a while. I installed several "tablet" apps from the Market, and I was very impressed by the formatting and presentation.
Unfortunately, performance was marginal at best, so I decided to flash the "official stable" version of CM7. I installed the same tablet apps as before and noticed that they were not displaying in "tablet mode". Landscape, yes, but not tablet-formatted.
For example, running Pocket Informant in landscape mode in CM9 provides a nice graphical notebook-like format, but CM7 displays the same as a simple landscape calendar, much like on my DROID Bionic.
So from this, I conclude that CM9 is a "real" tablet OS, while CM7 presents the Nook Color to the apps not as a tablet but as a high-resolution phone. Can anyone else confirm this? I absolutely LOVE the performance of CM7--it really flies and is very responsive--but long for the true "tablet" functionality of CM9.
That said, I'd love some input about how landscape mode works on the OS you have installed, and what "tablet-mode" apps actually render as a tablet.
1. What version of the OS are you running?
2. What "tablet" apps are you running?
3. Of those "tablet" apps you are running, what actually render as "tablet" apps?
Thanks!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
AFAIK Tablet mode only exists for honeycomb and newer. Any Android device on a 2.x build is seen as a handset.
That should explain what you are seeing
---------- Post added at 11:30 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:28 AM ----------
Sam Adams said:
It's still really early in the game. There's only one official ICS tablet out there - the Asus Transformer Prime. People were expecting many more ICS tablet announcements at CES a few weeks ago - didn't happen. I expect it's because ICS is based off of Honeycomb which didn't exactly set the world on fire and wasn't a big draw for app developers. But now that the ICS is going to be a joint phone/tablet OS - it should spark developers to greater heights. I also think the 7" form factor is going to be more and more popular also... and apps will be developed accordingly. Reader apps like Kindle look great on the nook because they were developed for the smaller form factors... others should follow suit.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I never used early builds of Honeycomb, but the version on my wife's transformer is great. Granted I prefer ICS on my transformer prime... but the versions (which I assume are more stable and way less buggy) of honeycomb out now seem really good