I’ve had my nook for months now and had it rooted for most of that time. When B&N announced that they would be sending out an update to the firmware, I thought that the best course of action would be to do the update myself and make sure that everything worked. I had read some reports of bricking the rooted nooks and didn’t want to take any chances.
I unregistered and wiped my nook back to factory defaults before I update. This was easy to do as it’s a function of the OS. Installing the update was just putting a zip file on the root of a microSD card, inserting the card and rebooting. Poof! You’re running OS 1.1.0.
I stuck back in the Touchnooter microSD card to try to re-root my nook. It went through several iterations of booting but never completed. I hit the web and started digesting posts. Within an hour I came to the understanding that there was a limitation to what could and couldn’t be done. You could root but not have the android market. You could root and get the market working but your reading might become unreliable. Rooted nooks that were rebooted would lose their bookmarks. Some reboots would wipe the nook all over again and require resetting to factory.
Resetting to factory was now only possible if you went through the backdoor. This involved booting your nook with the power button and during the boot process, holding the power button for twenty seconds to cause an emergency shutdown. Repeat this eight times and it automatically reset. I tried this just to make sure it worked. I was reset to 1.0.0 OS. So, I reupdated to 1.1.0.
At this point, I had to ask myself if it was really worthwhile to root. I had loaded some games and browsed the web from my nook. But I had really been using it for reading more than anything else. Rooting it had benefits but I decided for now to just leave it a nook.
Anything that I wanted to do on my rooted nook, I could do on my phone. And since I don’t read books on my phone, its battery lasts all day. Beside, I have a new Acer Iconia A100 that I can do all the rest on. I am a geek, you know.
When I updated my iPad to iOS 5, it somehow screwed up my music player. It would frequently not play, and when it would play, it played a completely unrelated song from the one I selected.
To fix it I completely reset it using the “Restore” function in iTunes. It took several hours, but worked fine afterwards.
“I am a geek, you know.”
I’m a backslidden geek. By that I mean I no longer buy the new stuff and much of the time I’m not even interested in the new stuff until it’s been around long enough to become standard and ubiquitous. The Kindle, Nook, etc. remind me of the iPhone in that they’re being replaced so fast I can’t see the point in getting any particular version of one of them…
(Re-reading the above, it just sounds like I’m getting old… Ugh.)