Nook color stock vs root vs android

[Pandamonium]

I could have sworn there was a sticky here, but I don't think my particular situation was really covered in the first few pages of that thread.

I have zero experience with android and zero with tablets other than tinkering with an iPad in the store a few times. What I am looking for is a pocketable device that I could use to read PDFs and access wikipedia/gmail occasionally. Ideally I would be able to "bookmark" parts of PDFs and hop between bookmarks. Highlighting would be cool too. Offline access to wikipedia would be awesome. Low cost is a pretty major requirement too.

I figure the odds of me doing this with the stock nook color are pretty slim. But is the main difference between rooting and installing android on a SD card/internal flash a matter of what's "under the hood"? If so, will one method be better if I wanted to play back a few GB of flash video? What about getting media to/from the NC itself? If I installed android on a 16GB SD card, could I access the storage on the internal flash as well as the SD card?

I feel like these are basic things I could figure out if I had a NC on hand to tinker with, but I was hoping to figure it out before I get one. Any links to NC for dummies or something would be helpful too.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Sorry, this is my thread to answer and I was out of town away from cell towers or any kind of internet.

The sticky has come down after I requested it. The Nook Color's half year of tablet value domination is over and the Touchpad is now the hackers tablet so the stickies got swapped to reflect that. Here is the thread:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2148620&highlight=nook+color

What your second paragraph needs are could actually be done by a stock Nook Color because they are so basic (except for the offline Wikipedia as I have never heard of such a thing).

You put CM7 on if you want a full blown tablet BEYOND books and PDFs. That is when you want games, productivity apps, better video playback apps (divx anyone?), updated Flash, Netflix, and things along those lines.

DON'T install the OS to a SD card though. Even if you have a class 10 card the experience sucks. You need to commit to installing it on the device. If you still want the stock OS, there are ways to dual boot. Here is the way I use:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1156909&highlight=dual+boot

One warning though: If you have been playing with iPads the Nook Color is probably a poor choice. I am very proud of my hacked Nook Color and I use it daily, but when my wife uses it (an iPad 2 owner) she calls it my "laggy piece of shit." Android isn't even on the same planet of responsiveness as iOS and I will admit even with an overclock sometimes it feels like my Nook Color is a Pentium 2 while her iPad is a Core 2 Duo.

I love my Nook Color because of its size compared to the iPad and the fact that it is a GREAT introduction to Android (because it is so easy to hack). But its day in the sun as a decent value is over, and a good chuck of the development community has moved to the Touchpad. In the end I thing if you got hooked on iPad responsiveness a Nook Color is a poor replacement, but if you need just a PDF reader it fits the bill. PM me if you need more help.