Nook Hacked, Are We Surprised?

B&N and Amazon may be interested in keeping secrets on their e-book readers. But that doesn’t mean the community would allow them to do that. In case you don’t remember, Amazon did try to hide a few things when it released the first generation Kindle. There were a few easter eggs here and there. But it took a very short time for people to figure out what Amazon was hiding. It seems B&N didn’t have too much success hiding those secret features either.

NookDev.com has already posted instructions on how you can root your Nook. So you can consider Nook hacked as well. But here is the nice part. It seems Nook comes with MMS support and Voice recognition capability. So it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for Nook owners to control their device without having to operate it by hand. The possibilities are truly intriguing when you think about it. Add to that the fact that you can use the Android platform to enhance the functionality of Nook, and you are looking at a device that has a lot of hidden potential.

I still don’t believe that Nook is the Kindle killer people have been waiting for. It’s certainly capable and a very good start by B&N, but Nook 2 will probably answer more questions than the current generation Nook. But that time we will have seen Kindle 3 as well. So it’d be easier to figure out whether Amazon can keep its lead in soon to be crowded e-book market. In the mean time, a lot of us now have a solid reason to buy a Nook (to root it and play with the Android kit that is). That is if you can get your hands on it before February.