Satisfied with Unrooted Nook?

[jersysman]

I have not rooted my NC and I doubt that I will. I bought it because I wanted something that I could both read my books and magazines on. The stock Nook does what I need it to do. I wish the reader was a little more robust when it comes to library management, but I'm sure that will be coming soon. So count me in as one who I think that the NC is perfect for.

[goldberry]

I put CM7 on an SD card just for fun and to see what the hype was about.

I am pretty sure I will probably in the future stay with this setup using a dual boot if I can figure it out or placing on the NC with a dual boot.

I have found lots of Apps that make using the NC much more than a reader and if B & N could get it together and provide them on the stock NC then running 2 OS's wouldn't be necessary. I fully understand their position as it is a business and they want to make money off the apps and most people would just grab the free ones as I have. If they opened up the NC and charged say a small subscription to the apps market say $4.99 a month they probably could get a lot of people on board.

I would encourage everyone to try the SD card with CM7 to at least see if it suits their purpose. You can easily pop out the card if you want to use the stock NC.

[anamardoll]

For my two cents, if I couldn't run CM7 or something similar on my Nook Color, I'd have to return/re-sell it entirely. I originally used the stock reader for my magazine subscriptions, but since B&N recently responded "Who knows?" to my question about being able to backup/read the magazines on my local computer, I've canceled those too.

I really only use my CM7 build for reading, but I think that apparently I have different reading needs than most.

1. Highlighting. I have to use Moon+ for highlighting. The highlight slider bars are intuitive to me and super easy to use. Being able to export all my highlights and notes to email, Evernote, iPaper, etc. is also crucial. The B&N stock app doesn't provide export (and, in fact, lost all my notes once when a faulty book crashed the reader - that was a dark day), and the highlighting takes me four or five swipes to snag precisely what I want. I don't like having to fight my reader.

2. Covers. I dunno if they fixed this in 1.2, but I hated how the NC only shows the cover of the book during the swoop-and-load. Moon+ and Aldiko both let you savor the cover as long as you want - and this not only shows off the LCD screen to perfect advantage, it's also useful for books where there are "clues" in the covers. I like studying the symbolism in my covers.

3. Cloud Library. I'm a hobbyist reviewer and I receive a lot of electronic ARCs and books from places other than B&N. I like being able to use Calibre2opds to download my books to my device via the simple Aldiko/Moon+ interfaces. I know you can do that on NC, but the interface is very different, and having everything dump into "My Downloads" is annoying to me.

4. Library Management. Aldiko/Moon+ lets you put your books as shortcuts on your CM7 homescreen. You can fit something like 6x8 (I think that's the CM7 height/width available to widgets?) titles on a single screen. There's definitely a lot more room for titles than on the stock B&N software, PLUS you can organize them perfectly (i.e., lined up neatly) however you want, PLUS you can bring over covers/metadata/etc. from Calibre if the publisher didn't set it properly in the first place.

5. PDF support. OK, I know you can now buy pdf readers in the B&N app store, but you can get equally good ones on the Android market for free. And frankly, I am chuffed at the idea of BUYING a reader to fix the extremely poor B&N stock reader.

6. Button mapping. I like using the volume buttons to turn the pages rather than being confined to using the touch screen. If there's a way to do this on the B&N stock app, I don't know how.

7. Landscape reading. There are definitely epub books where this is desirable and necessary, imho. The B&N stock reader doesn't let you do this except with certain children's books.

8. Public library integration. I was so sad that an Overdrive app wasn't included in the 1.2 app store update. I thought that would be a shoo-in.

I think everyone should do what they personally see as best, and not trying to start a flame war, but I did want to preemptively chime in to say that not everyone who roots or uses CM7 is just after shiny tablet games.

[Carriebear]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

I think everyone should do what they personally see as best, and not trying to start a flame war, but I did want to preemptively chime in to say that not everyone who roots or uses CM7 is just after shiny tablet games.

anamardoll - Yikes, I am so sorry if anything in my original post came out that way, I didn't intend it to, so I apologize if that's the case. It's very interesting to me, like I said, to read the different reasons that people root/do not root/run CM7/dual-boot the NookC, and it sounds to me as if you have the perfect setup for your reading needs.

[=X=]

When I first got my nook I really wanted to keep the stock OS and not fuss with the device, I did not want to tinker with a tablet/reader. After all I had my eInk eReader for two years and never had a need to tinker with them.

However I found the stock nook reader and PDF reader to be horrible and painful to use and I found myself rooting my nook in less than a week and promptly installing Kindle/Aldiko and ezPDF.

I now have CM7 and couldn't be happier. It has made reading PDF, Kindle, ePUB the best experience as well as make synchronizing books (Kindle,PDF,ePUB) trivial. Writing documents using a robust app like "Documents To Go" and the ability to change keyboards like SwiftKey, SlideIt make typing very efficient.

In addition to that some of the productivity apps really make the tablet a great tool, such as evernote, calendars apps, SMB Windows network browser, and also games.


In the end I do primary read on my nook but having a tablet device has also help in my productivity since it is much easier to carry an 7" tablet than a laptop/10"+ tablet.

=X=

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by Carriebear

anamardoll - Yikes, I am so sorry if anything in my original post came out that way, I didn't intend it to, so I apologize if that's the case. It's very interesting to me, like I said, to read the different reasons that people root/do not root/run CM7/dual-boot the NookC, and it sounds to me as if you have the perfect setup for your reading needs.

Haha, no I didn't think you sounded judgmental at all, but thank you for the clarification. Just preemptively chiming in just in case someone did think that way.