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