Angry Birds and Other Games Do Work on the Nook Touch, Kind of

Hacking the Sony PRS-T1 and experimenting with installing various Android apps has gotten me curious about trying different things on the Nook Touch all over again since it works a lot better rooted than the Sony does at this point.

A lot of it has to do with the way each device refreshes. The Sony is made to refresh every single page, where the Nook has the partial page refresh ability built-in, which makes a big difference when trying to run Android apps it turns out.

Yesterday I posted about animation speed working surprisingly fast while running live wallpapers on the Nook Touch. Experimenting with that I figured out the animation continues to run in the background even when the screen pauses—the screen just needs to be manually refreshed by pressing the “n” button below the screen, and by doing so it actually lets the animation run freely in a partial refresh state.

The problem with this, however, is that the touchscreen is paused in this state so you can’t interact with the game unless you hit the “n” button again or touch the screen to go back to normal view.

Someone knowledgeable enough with Android should be able to tweak the Nook to enable the partial refresh state that activates when pressing the “n” to work globally. If so, the games would be somewhat playable. There would be lots of trails and funky coloration, but the games would work because they already install, load, and play when you press the “n” button. Take a look (excessive adverb warning ahead)…

The point of this experiment isn’t to play these games on the Nook Touch, it’s the fact that they do work to some degree on the Nook’s E Ink screen, which is very surprising. It has been thought that games like Angry Birds don’t work on the Nook Touch, but they in fact do work, it just the Nook’s screen getting stuck in the refresh cycle that makes the game seem like it’s not working, but it’s actually loading and running just fine.

E Ink is getting closer all the time to being able to run fast enough for these types of applications. As color E Ink and the hardware that powers it continues to evolve, at some point there could be tablets and cell phones using these types of energy efficient displays, not just ebook readers. Throw on some LED light film and LCD better watch its back.