Awhile ago I noticed over at XDA a new Tweaked Modded ROM for the Nook Touch and Nook Touch with GlowLight.
I haven’t tried installing it yet, and was wondering what the usability differences are between it and the regular Nooter rooting package.
The Tweaked Modded ROM is based off the Nook’s official 1.2.1 firmware, and includes a long list of changes, including adding root, Busybox and init.d support, all rendering is done on the GPU to improve gaming and to make everything run smoother, image and text rendering has been improved, apps auto calibrate upon boot, Chainfire3D drivers were added, as well as Kick Ass Kernelizer, auto-zipalign and defragdb on boot, and a number of other tweaks and improvements that I don’t know what they mean.
Directions for installing the Tweaked Modded ROM can be found at XDA.
One detail I noticed in reading the thread is the ROM is based off of the UK firmware. This doesn’t really affect much, other than the Nook ebook store. You can change the system/build.prop file to make the US Nook store show up instead. Here’s the link to the directions for making the modifications.
Like the other rooting packages, this sets everything up so that you can use the Nook Touch more like an Android tablet. You can even install Google apps and get access to the Google Play store to install a bunch of Android apps. The Nook runs an old version of Android, however, Android 2.1, so a lot of newer apps won’t install.
If anyone reading this has tried this ROM let us know what you think in the comments below.
I used this new ROM for a month or so. It is a UK ROM, but I had no trouble using it on the US. One difference that I noted and some (but not all) others noted was that the text seemed to appear darker, especially with the glowlight on. The primary reason I stopped using this in total was that it uses a modified kernel which causes some strange things to happen occasionally* (at least my Nook). I am currently using many of the features of this new ROM with the standard kernel. This took a lot of trial and error and is not for the technologically challenged.
Bottom line … give it a try, make sure you have a backup (as always). If your Nook doesn’t exhibit the strange behavior on the new kernel, you will likely like it.
*I had already tried the modified kernel used by this ROM in the past and the strange behavior began to appear after about a month at that time also.
Thanks for your insight on this, David. I think I’ll just stick with what I’ve got. It’s good to see that there are still developers working on the Nook though. I was surprised to see a ROM available after all this time. Too bad there isn’t a way to get a newer version of Android on the Nooks—2.1 is the biggest limiting factor.