Nook Color Android hacks are being sold on eBay

By Crave - CNET

"Hacking or rooting the Barnes & Noble Nook Color has become a commercial venture for some, and that has plenty of Android enthusiasts calling foul.

In recent days folks on eBay have started selling hacks for the Nook Color pre-installed on microSD cards, which start around $60 for 4GB cards and work their way upwards. Installing one of the cards in the Nook Color's microSD slot allows users to override Barnes & Noble's 'closed' Android-based Nook firmware with an open Android system that supports running a multitude of Android apps. 'Modders' have been 'porting' various 'rooted' versions of the Android OS to the Nook Color, including a preview version of Honeycomb (Android 3.0), which is designed for tablets. This has made the affordable though slightly underpowered Nook Color ($250) a popular item with Android enthusiasts who don't want to shell out bigger money for true Android tablets like the $799 Motorola Xoom.

Over at the Android Police Will Shanklin was dismayed at the turn of events. He urged readers not to pay money for a Nook Color SD card that runs Honeycomb.

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Laptops play catch up to the iPad, Xoom

By Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News

"Market researcher Gartner released a research note Thursday claiming that laptops are not meeting the demands of the social-networking era. So, will mobile PCs become more like the Xoom and the iPad, which are, in turn, larger versions of the smartphone? In a word, yes.

This theory--or fact, depending on how you look at it--can also be restated as the post-PC era, which is the Apple marketing-spin corollary to the Gartner argument.

But let's stick to Gartner's analysis about the unsuitability of laptops in the social-networking era. Here are the most significant points in the note about the average mainstream laptop:

* Battery life: not capable of all-day 'untethered computing'
* Connections: constant and immediate connections are not possible (i.e., no standard 3G/4G)
* Heavy: still too heavy, lacks real mobility

What this means is more laptops need to be like the 11.6-inch MacBook Air: very light, very thin--just like a tablet and, by extension, like a smartphone.

Though small laptops aren't for everybody, it does mean more people will gravitate to this style as companies like Apple upgrade to powerful silicon like Intel's low-voltage Sandy Bridge processor (and its future Ivy Bridge chip) and upcoming power-efficient chips from Advanced Micro Devices.

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SHOW #99 - NerdBoyTV: National Day of Unplugging

In this episode of NerdBoyTV, Ryan Yee jokes about how miserably he failed to stay off gadgets and the Internet for National Day of Unplugging. It's still a good idea, so if you missed this annual event, try it another day — no gadgets, no WiFi.