My Daughters are Androids (users)

A few months ago, my daughters, ages four and eight, each received a Barnes & Noble Nook Color mainly as a reward for enduring their dear older brother's particularly long and demanding baseball schedule. After they had them for a few days, I decided to search on-line to see what exactly these Nooks were and what they could do. I didn't know much about tablets or e-readers and really did not think I cared.

In a previous article, I touched upon the fact that I had recently converted these Nook Colors to dual-boot Android tablets. Well, about a month has passed, and the results have been extremely favorable at the least.

The wonderful people at Cyanogenmod, a community of developers have created a distribution for over 80 devices including the Nook Color. The Nook Color by itself is a nice e-reader, but runs a scaled back, limited version of Android and lacks access to all of the available Android apps.

Running Android 2.3 Gingerbread on the Nook Color opens up the entire world of Android apps to it. Of course, there are some you don't want or need. The Nook Color doesn't have a camera or phone capabilities. So, you won't need any of them. But, you can download an app so that you read Kindle books on it! Yes, Kindlebooks, from the Nook maker's competition, Amazon.

You will need

• A Nook Color. They are currently selling for about $149.00
• a microSD card and adapter from 4G to 32G with a class (speed) of 4 to 10. I used a 8G, class 10 card I found online with an adapter for under $10. You don't need to get the most expensive card, but don't get the absolute cheapest either.
• A computer with an internet connection and a slot for a SD card
• a microSD adapter
• 30 to 40 minutes of your time. However, if you miss a step, you have to start again from scratch, take it from my personal experience. So, follow the steps carefully. The second time I did it for the second Nook took considerably less time.

The tricky part

Initially, I was going to detail a step by step with some serious paraphrasing. Instead, if you are interested in investigating further, I will refer you to the Cyanogenmod "New to Nook" forum. Provided there are step by step instructions, troubleshooting and even have links to Youtube videos on how to do this. This way, if you get stuck, you can get help right from the source rather than secondhand from me. To make the microSD card bootable, I did not have success using WinImage as recommended there and used Win32Diskimager instead.

I would rate the entire process at about a seven out of ten on the difficulty scale. If you are fairly tech-savvy, have some patience and can follow instructions verbatim, you can do this. Not so much and you still want to do this? Then, the following is for you.

Cheating is OK

You can cheat and have someone else do this for you by buying a preloaded microSD card from N2A cards. Well, cheat is a bad word because doing this helps support Cyanogenmod. N2A cards also does this for the Nook Tablet.

The good news is that you do not void the warranty by making your Nook Color run as an Android tablet and if you ever want to revert to the original Barnes & Noble version, you simply remove the microSD card and reboot the Nook.

The End Result

How do my girls feel about what I have done to their Nooks?   Both use them exclusively as Android tablets. There has been no desire to remove the microSD cards to have the Nooks boot up as originally intended by Barnes & Noble. Parental threats to remove the cards for behavioral issues have been met with almost instantaneous compliance on numerous occasions.