NOOKcolor Shipments Halted – Why?

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NOOKcolor Shipments Halted – Why?

News has it that Barnes & Noble have stopped shipments of their successful NOOKcolor Android tablet ereader. This color reader has seen great coverage in the Android developer community because of its enticing hardware and locked nature. While Barnes & Noble have intended this device to be used strictly for reading, sharing, and purchasing books (and down the line apps for reading as well,) it’s been met with some fast moving code tricks and hacks that have allowed avid coders to break its system wide open. When open, this ereader becomes more of a fabulous looking, nicely sized, fully functional Android tablet. What’s all this got to do with shipments?

One of the possibilities here is that they’ve stopped shipments directly in the face of the fact that their locked-down system has been broken into so easily. Another, possibly more realistic reason is the one that’s been floating around, apparently straight from Barnes & Noble themselves:

“B&N’s short-term solution to the problem is to move stock from one store to another to cover demand, with cooperation at the local level between stores.”

What do you think? Is there some third option? Perhaps Barnes & Noble wants to boost sales of their non-color NOOK for some reason? They DO have a valentines promotion going on right now – suspicious!

– thanks for the tip, CCard!

BONUS let’s watch a video of Honeycomb on NOOKcolor, for fun:

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  • Anonymous

    “Now Available” on website. Stores receiving stock replenishment Monday. Just an unfortunate delay that appears to be now over.

  • You

    I remember hearing that root permissions in Android is a “feature of the software.” Not something that should be locked down like the icrap line.

    There will always be a way around security, why do they even try

  • You

    I remember hearing that root permissions in Android is a “feature of the software.” Not something that should be locked down like the icrap line.

    There will always be a way around security, why do they even try

  • Jon Garrett

    why would they want to halt shipments just as sales of this device could see a dramatic increase?

    I hope they don’t follow the apple model of “this device was intended to be used this way” and let people use them the way they want to.

    porting Android to it only makes it that much better and the new ways users would begin using it would only inspire the manufacturer.

    • http://twitter.com/Nguyen Vincent Nguyen

      perhaps they’re trying to figure out a way to lock the device up? Would be a moronic move.