My Nook Color is still alive!

NOOKcolor showing Android home screen

Holy cow, this thing still works!(?!) Picked up this O.G. Barnes & Noble NOOKcolor ($249) in 2010 (IIRC) when I coudln’t afford an iPad ($499), because “they” had figured out how to load an unrestricted Android build onto it (CyanogenMod; this thing reports it’s running Android version 2.3.7, kernel 2.6.32.9, CyanogenMod-7.2.0-RC2-encore, on an ARMv7 CPU with 480MB reported RAM...). This thing has been sitting without a charge for probably a couple of years at least, but a few minutes on its charger and it fired right up.

(Compare with a couple of Kindle Fire tablets I had, that are much newer and totally dead, and headed to e-waste recycling.)

This was a device designed and shipped when USB charging beyond the 5V 500ma standard was still in its infancy, so it came with a "proprietary" cable that ends in a weirdly long USB Mini B plug that illuminates to show charging state (I don’t recall if it will charge at all on the standard USB Mini B plug, or if that’s only good for data transfer?).

ETA: Per Wikipedia: “The Nook Color uses a modified connector with two depths. The first depth is compatible with Micro USB (5-conductor), while the second depth has 12 conductors. This change was made to increase the amount of power available to charge the larger battery of the Nook Color when using the included cable at 2A as opposed to the 0.5 A limit of standard USB connections.

“Because of this, the USB cable included with the Nook Color is physically incompatible with other devices employing standard micro-USB connectors. However, the Nook Color itself is physically compatible with standard micro-USB cords and will still charge at a slower rate on such cords.”

Anyway, it’s way too outdated to be anything but an e-reader / media consumption device / play whatever games it already has loaded, but, it will still work as an e-reader, which is all I really would want it to do ... And epub / PDFs still work perfectly well on the thing.

NOOKcolor showing loaded ebooks in Aldiko reader app