Remember that post from a couple of weeks ago about how someone at XDA forums got Android 3.0 Honeycomb, the latest version of Android designed for tablets, to work on the Nook Color?
It turns out the process is far simpler than I thought. There’s no hacking or rooting required. All you need is a spare 4GB or larger microSD card to get Honeycomb running on the Nook Color.
My new memory card arrived last Friday so I was able to try out the Honeycomb ROM extensively over the weekend. It works surprisingly well and is definitely worth trying out. It’s not even the full version of Honeycomb yet, just the preview version, and it’s still impressive.
I put together this Nook Color Honeycomb video review and how to page. Take a look. There’s tons of screenshots and instructions on how to get Honeycomb on your Nook Color. Even if you don’t have or want a Nook Color, this is a good sneak peek at the operating system that’s coming to some of the major Android tablets this year.
Is multi-taking improved and how do flash videos play? Owners of Archos 70 are still waiting on some certification from Acrobat for a supposedly smoother flash experience than we currently get from our generic flash player.
I ask about multi-tasking because I find I don’t care to run Pandora Radio in the background if I am doing any significant web browsing, since it slows me down. I am starting to think I need a tablet with more memory than 256k and/or a dual core processor.
Video is one thing not working yet on this preview version of Honeycomb but should be working soon when it gets the official release. I guess there’s a ROM for Froyo that’s more polished and has Flash but I haven’t tried it yet. I haven’t used the multi-tasking much; I’m so used to backing out of apps or going to the homescreen. I was running Pandora yesterday for a long time while doing a bunch of other stuff and it seemed to be running smooth.
One of the things I was hoping with my tablet was that I could play a flash video on some website and then switch over to another web page or reading app and continue listening to the video in the background.
Unfortunately that didn’t turn out to be the case, at least not with the version of Android I have (Froyo).
I don’t know if that’ll work with Honeycomb or not either. The video player pauses when switching apps. Not sure how the browser will handle that but will try it once video starts working.
Another thing that annoys me is managing storage on my device. Although there is plenty of free space, the OS does some kind of special allocation that only makes part of it usable. And my ability to specify whether things are to be stored on my actual SDCARD versus the device are limiting.
And a weird thing is many applications identify space that is actually on the device as my “SDCARD”. For instance in Aldiko, when it lists the books on my SDCARD, it is actually pointing to books stored on my device, and I can’t seem to do anything about it. Although I have lots of epubs on my actual SDCard, Aldiko imports them into another directory on my device. It is quite annoying.