Submitted by Over the weekend Barnes & Noble’s Nook was rooted and the hacking and developer community is hard at work bringing new functionality to adventurous Nook owners.
Over the weekend Barnes & Noble’s Nook was rooted and the hacking and developer community is hard at work bringing new functionality to adventurous Nook owners.
I wonder why they didn’t just sell it as an open android device to begin with. Would it have cost them any more? It certainly would have generated 10x the buzz with all the additional features. Would supporting it be any more than what is required for a phone?
Big companies confuse me.
I’m guessing it’s a support issue. If playing around with the root account on the device was an official feature, I can imagine then being inundated with support calls from people bricking their devices. By making it an unofficial feature that you have to void the warranty to access, then they can avoid all those pesky support issues.
They are selling it as an appliance, not a computing device. So they try to lock things down as much as possible, so people can’t mess their device up by accident. Of course this limits it application as a more general device, but its not selling it as a general device.
I don’t think it was limited it marketing appeal in any way though, this is being marketed to the general consumer, they are trying to take the Kindle head on. The number of people who would get excited by easy rooting are just not significant. I mean look at Nokia’s n900 phone, you can gain root access just by typing sudo gainroot in a terminal. But I’ve never seen anyone make a big deal of this feature, people only make a big deal about rooting when your not allowed to, otherwise it gets ignored. Used by people who know what they are doing of course, but it certainly wouldn’t get a story on os news.
but the difference between those two things is rapidly becoming ephemeral…
Appliance makers need to (and if not, will, inevitably, be forced to) wake up to that fact.
no its not. There will always be a certain kind of geek that will do this sort of thing, but locking it down is the right way to do it for the 99.9%. I would *never* buy an e-reader that had a full android OS.
Yeah, I agree. Make it hackable for people who know what they’re doing, but lock it down enough so that you keep the loaded gun out of reach just far enough so that Joe Sixpack doesn’t hurt himself.
If you want to remain a total hostage to the OEM you are of course free to do so, but note that the author of TFA himself mentions ‘that one feature’ that he would like to have (but can’t get as long as its locked-down).
I suspect the total number of folks wanting features that they can’t get in the locked down version will typically be more than 0.01%, hence the pressure over the long term for the OEM’s to open up their appliances (or at least make it easy for those who want out of the straight-jacket, to get out).
So here is the thing, an e-reader is not a good general computer. Button placement is different (designed around holding it to flip pages), the screen is radically different (the whole point of the device) where refreshes take about half a second. If it were designed as a general purpose device, that would mean the UI couldn’t be catered to giving a good reading/navigation experience, button placement couldn’t be geared around it either, and the screen would make it crappy anyways even if it were. This isn’t about getting locked into anything, a full android os on an e-reader is pretty retarded if you actually want to use it for reading books.
I do understand the drive to pull things apart and see how they work, but I was responding to a comment that a full android install should be on these things.
Depends on the design of the gadget.
I wasn’t talking about geeks, my initial post here was on the fundamental issue of whether locking things down will be viable in the long run as these gadgets get more powerful.
As for whatever ‘a full Android install’ means, I never mentioned that, the post I initially responded to didn’t either, and besides, we’re talking here about gadgets that already have a full OS on them anyway – the question is how much of that capability is locked away from the user.
The author of TFA doesn’t seem to be a geek, but even he thinks it would be a great thing to be able to look up references (via Google/Wiki) while reading an ebook. A well-designed gadget could easily do this, if its creator chooses to let its users do so.
In the long run, it will be these kind of ‘power users’, a much larger segment of the userbase, rather than the hack-it-apart geeks, that will force OEMs to make more flexible, less-locked-down gadgets. It will, however, be the those geeks who show the ‘power users’ what is possible (much like the author of TFA is now waiting to see what can be done with a rooted Nook).
it would be one thing to root a nook to run a terminal prompt but another to have a browser, pandora, notepad, etc