Hasta La Gadget!

The Nook hacking frenzy seems to be as active as the first wild days of iPhone cracking, with new news arriving all the time. Now owners of the Barnes & Noble e-reader can “jailbreak” the device without having to open it up.

Previously, to gain full root access to the internals of the Nook’s Android operating system meant grabbing a screwdriver and physically popping out the internal microSD card on which the OS resides. Now, thanks to a tiny 7.5k download, you can do all the dirty work from the comfort of your computer’s file browser.

The file, called bravo_update.dat, comes in the soft-root package, and can be downloaded from the currently bandwidth-buffeted nookDevs site. All you do is pop another microSD card into the external slot, copy across the file via USB cable and eject. Switch the Nook off and on, immediately holding down both page-turn buttons.

This forces the Nook to run a firmware updater which does what the hardware hack did before (change a word in the operating system’s init.rc file). Now, after grabbing the Google Android developers kit to run on your computer, you are good to hack.

Needless to say, this will probably void your warranty, but it should work with all versions of the Nook firmware, including the two-day-old v1.1.0. The nookDevs team is also working on adding Nook-friendly software: first up should be an email application, coming in the next few days.

nookDevs root enabler for nook [nookDevs]

See Also:

• Nook E-Reader Gets Hacked to Run Apps, Browser
• Nook Torn Open, Hacked, Rooted
• Barnes & Noble Improves Nook With Firmware Update

While this isn’t quite bad enough to merit a “dude, your Dell is on fire” part deux, it’s a pretty frightful example of the hazard modern batteries (of any kind) represent. A Consumerist reader reports that her year-old Dell Mini 9 recently popped, “hissed and sizzled” as it filled her room with smoke and tarnished her fine wooden flooring. Judging from the fallout pictures (available after the break), we’d say the culprit for this Mini fire (oh!) was the battery pack, which again reminds us how badly we need to improve our energy storage technologies. Dell has been quick to remedy the situation with an upgraded laptop being sent over to the young lady and the melted machine packed off to the labs for inspection, though there’s no mention of compensation for the owner’s scarred floor and mind.

Continue reading Dell Mini 9 suffers meltdown, scorches owner’s floor

Dell Mini 9 suffers meltdown, scorches owner’s floor originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Dec 2009 06:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s the premise: you take a good old fashioned augmented reality setup, the likes of which we’ve seen all over the land, and attach a three-dimensional, rotatable iPhone to it. Not impressed yet, are you? Neither were we, but there’s some secret sauce to this one: you can actually launch apps on the simulated iPhone. That extra layer of interactivity makes the video after the break a lot more fascinating than it has any right to be, though it’s worth pointing out that we don’t think the apps are actually usable — they just give the illusion of launching. Anyhow, don’t wait around while all the cool kids are watching it, go have a gander yourself.

Continue reading iPhone in iPhone app is useless, but mesmerizing

iPhone in iPhone app is useless, but mesmerizing originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Dec 2009 06:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The whole “man, how time flies” thing feels a little played out, but we definitely just heard the Pavilion dv2 say as much to the Wind U100. Believe it or not, those two machines were just a couple of the legions that ushered us into a netbook-crazed 2009, and now DisplaySearch has the figures that prove what we’ve all been thinking: netbooks are the bees knees. According to their research, shipments of low-cost, miniaturized laptops shot up 103 percent year-over-year; compare that to the 5 percent uptick in the conventional laptop market, and you’ll start to get a feel for the shifting trend. Potentially more amazing is the revenue analysis, which found that netbooks experienced a 72 percent rise in year-over-year revenue growth while all other mobile computers saw a loss. It’s tough to say if the momentum can be stopped, but if folks have continued to buy these things despite the limited CPU options and lackluster multimedia performance, we suspect there isn’t anything those angered CULV alternatives can do to stop the inevitable rise to stardom.

Netbooks party hard in 2009: shipments up 103 percent year-over-year originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Dec 2009 05:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Corning’s darn-near-impenetrable Gorilla glass certainly isn’t new — in fact, we spied it in a few of Motion Computing’s tablets just a few months ago — but it’s still not commonplace on mainstream gizmos. Yet. SmartPlanet sat down with Dr. Donnell Walton, senior applications engineer at Corning, in order to discuss the merits of the display technology as well as its importance in the gadget space. The discussion also mentioned that both Motorola’s Droid and Dell’s Adamo (not to mention Cowon’s S9 PMP) are sporting the glass, which acts to make displays “damage-resistant.” Not surprisingly, the company is seeing huge demand in the smartphone arena, where touchscreen-centric phones are being shoved into pockets at random and then costing manufacturers big bucks as return rates creep up. It’s a pretty interesting read if you’re into that type of thing, and yes, we did just give you permission to try and split your Droid display wide open in a moment of frustration. Just don’t count on Motorola to accept that as a valid excuse for your RMA.

[Thanks, Jeff]

Motorola Droid and Dell Adamo latest to get Gorilla glass originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Dec 2009 03:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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