Nook Color running Jelly Bean (CM10)
Having sold my Nook Color and replacing it with a Nexus 7, a twinge of nostalgia hit when I saw that a Jelly Bean ROM was available for the Barnes & Noble Nook Color. This ROM is apparently fully functional, with a new kernel, drivers and more.
It is a very significant milestone for this close to two years old tablet now. Without much support from Barnes & Nobles, the developers have been working hard to create this version that we now see today. While Alpha 1, it is already quite functional. Depending on your usage patterns, you may want to give this Alpha 1 version a trial, but I would probably wait a couple of weeks till the devs upload an update or when it hits beta.
Despite being a somewhat older and under-powered device (by today’s standards), and with a large number of technical hurdles that have since been overcome, the end result is an official CyanogenMod-10 build that is really quite functional and polished despite its alpha status. There are bugs, but nothing that makes this build unusable for everyday activity, unless you have some fairly specific needs:
- The home button does not currently wake the device.
- Netflix doesn’t work.
- Charging isn’t detected unless the device is awake at the time of being plugged in.
Do read the XDA thread for more details and for more details on how to install it.
If you are familiar with ROM installation, the steps are pretty easy.
- Download the latest CM10 alpha .zip (and optionally the google apps from another source, as we are not distributing this software) and place it on your SD card.
- (recommended) Boot into your recovery and make a nandroid backup of your current rom and data. This way anything goes wrong, you can always recover your original installation.
- Again using your preferred recovery image, do a full wipe of the system as well as a factory reset (data wipe).
- Use the recovery to install the .zip (or .zips if you are also installing the Google apps).
- Reboot & Enjoy!
Still not convinced? A video can do wonders. Do note that this video was captured about a month ago and since then, there have been quite a bit of active development on the ROM up to the current Alpha-1 stage, so performance on the Nook Color in actuality would be better than what the video shows.