Barnes & Noble Sends NOOKcolors Back to Store Shelves With No Rootkit
Much was made of the reason why NOOKcolors had disappeared from certain store shelves nearly a week ago. Some guessed it was just a slight hiccup in Barnes & Noble’s shipping schedule, while others feared the worst: that they would introduce a new version to prevent folks from rooting and installing custom ROMs. (The most popular theory being because they didn’t want to give folks the ability to buy digital books from other stores.)
At that time, we learned that information may have been wrong – there was just an inventory bug they had to take care of and the flow of available NOOKcolor devices dried up a bit as a result.
Thankfully, NOOKcolor devices are starting ship back to retail shelves and they seem just as hackable as they always have been. In fact, the only changes seem to be the exclusion of a light and proximity sensor that once sat left of the NOOK logo. The serial number structures have also changed. One rooter specifically tried to load Honeycomb via his SD card onto his new model to see if he’d be denied:
More thorough testing is needed. It is still possible that some software changes happened that could mean the currently popular ‘Autonooter’ rooting method might need tweaking. At the very least, however, a nookcolor owner can boot off the SD and flash a rooted ROM over the internal memory and theres absolutely nothing stopping it, or run the OS completely off the SD card if they wish to leave the internal memory intact.
So put those pitchforks down – all is well in the land of nooks, and as far as we can tell, nothing’s going to keep you folks from freeing your devices. [Thanks, EarlyMon!]