Hasta La Gadget!

Not to be outdone by Amazon’s recent announcement marking the Kindle its “best-selling product of all-time,” Barnes & Noble declared its own eBook reader, the Nook Color, its “biggest bestseller ever in its nearly 40-year history.”

Like Amazon’s own announcement, Barnes & Noble isn’t offering much in the way of concrete sales figures, but this certainly doesn’t bode well for print media–particularly not when quotes like “Barnes & Noble also announced that it now sells more digital books than its large and growing physical book business on BN.com” are bandied about.

In the same press release the company noted that it moved almost one million NOOKbooks on Christmas Day this year, thanks to new titles by James Patterson, Stieg Larsson, John Grisham, and that George W. Bush guy.

The Nook Color first hit the market on November 16th.

Is Barnes & Noble planning a follow up to the Nook? Well, duh. The company scored hits with the first Nook and the Nook Color–it even managed to eat into some of Amazon’s massive Kindle market share with the device. Like any other company with a business sense, Barnes & Noble did the logical thing, applying for trademarks by the boatload.

A number have surfaced recently, including “Nook2,” “NookSmart,” “Nook Kids,” and “Nook Cook.” Of course, it’s impossible to say whether the company actually intends to use any of these specific names or whether it’s just covering all of its bases. 

It’s also impossible to know whether the applications are intended for hardware, software, or sections of the online bookstore, though “Nook2” certainly seems to hint at a sequel to the original E-Ink device.

You had to know the hacking community was going to have a field day with the Nook Color — a $249 Android Tablet hiding behind with a thin e-reader coating. Indeed it didn’t take long to get rooted nor for Android 2.2 to get installed on there, but that particular hack comes with an interesting potential side-effect: small-scale thermonuclear explosions. Enabling FroYo requires disabling the device’s battery monitoring process, the very one that would be responsible for shutting down the device before the cells start overheating and, ultimately, going critical. Yeah it’s unlikely, but it could happen. Meanwhile, another hack has enabled the Android Market, but those instructions begin with a very daunting warning: “Very smart people have failed at this. If the following instructions confuse you, you might want to wait until an easier method has been developed.”

And, thankfully, there might be a much easier way coming, with Barnes & Noble reportedly telling Smartphone Mag that Android 2.2 will be officially coming to the Nook Color in January. Yes, Android 2.3 is what’s happening, but this is still an exciting upgrade as it will finally also allow access to a traditional Android home screen and even enable the Android Market.

Update: Okay, cancel that order for an asbestos carrying case. One of the developers of the Nook Color root wrote in to let us know that there is a secondary temperature monitor which should keep things below the ignition point. Hack away — or just wait a month.

Update 2: Barnes & Noble PR just got back to us to reiterate that Nook Color’s own shop will begin adding apps in early 2011 and that there are currently no plans to enable Android Market. Move along, nothing to see here, folks.

[Thanks, Ryan]

Nook Color getting Android 2.2 and Market in January, current hacks could make it blow up? (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Dec 2010 10:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Our supply checks say that 10 out of 10 analysts are insanely bullish about tablets — despite the fact that there are only 2.5 competitive products on the market, and one of them only came out a month ago. So, naturally, it isn’t difficult to scrounge up sales predictions that show the tablet rocketing into the stratosphere, cutting into PC market share, while also expanding the market outright to accommodate its post-PC ways. Gartner‘s guess is 55 million tablets next year, while IDC has a more conservative estimate of 42 million, but both predict a sharp, exponential rise in the following years, and IDC takes it one step further: 18 months from now, combined smartphone and tablet sales will eclipse the PC, it claims, with both categories hovering in the mid-400 million range.

Now, that number is mostly smartphones, which isn’t an unprecedented shift in and of itself — the PC took a major hit in popularity in Japan once the kids got ahold of these newfangled phone things — but overall it represents a shift from the open-ended, flexible, and powerful PC to the narrow, task-specific, app-driven nature of the iOS and Android kind. Or you could spin it the completely opposite way: people need phones, so they buy a nice phone. No PC death knell in that behavior, and the tablet is still a very niche product with some good PR. Either way, we’ll be much more impressed with this sort of market battle when it’s the tablet (perhaps with a little help from the smartbook or netbook-lite category) going up against the Windows and Mac PC head-on, without smartphones shouldering most of the load.

Combined sales of smartphones and tablets to surpass the humble PC in 18 months, says IDC originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nook Color gets an SDK, documentation aplenty originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Dec 2010 15:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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