That Didn't Take Long

Wired reports: Barely weeks after its launch, Barnes & Noble’s Android-based Nook e-reader has been hacked and “rooted” (root, or full system access, has been obtained). This has been done by a loose team of hackers who, like the iPhone Dev Team, are documenting their work on a wiki—Nook Devs.

If you tear open a Nook (which the team has done), you’ll find that the Android operating system is contained on a microSD card (separate from the microSD expansion slot). From here, it’s a simple matter of using a card reader to mount this card on your computer and changing a single word in the init.rc file (the file that is in charge of which services are begun at startup, similar to a Linux boot).

This single hack will let you plug the Nook in to your computer (once you have reassembled it) and access the OS using the freely available Google Android developers kit. Right now you’ll have to be a hardcore nerd to make much use of this, but as we saw with the iPhone, these things progress to user-friendly applications fairly fast, especially when the hard work has already been done.

Before you tut, toss your head, and mutter “So what?” like some petulant teenager, think about the uses. The Nook is now a computer running a full Android operating system, with a built-in free cellular connection to the Internet. It also has a battery that lasts days, not hours. Now are you getting excited? This could turn into the Roomba of e-readers, only it won’t suck.