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Inside the Nook Glowlight Plus (It’s Been Hacked)

Barnes & Noble’s latest ereader is less than two days old and it is already being hacked.

A Glowlight Plus owner over at XDA Forums has revealed that she has gained control of her Nook. She hasn’t rooted it yet, though.

The first step involved prying the back off of her unit. The front panel is simply glued into the rear metal shell, and it can be pried off – if you have the guts:

glowplus1

As you can see in the photo, the CPU is a Freescale i.MX6L, a single-core CPU intended for simple uses like ereaders. The hacker also confirmed that this Nook does run Android 4.4, and she told us that the Glowlight Plus had only 512MB RAM, and no Bluetooth.

That is disappointing news for those of us who were hoping it could be hacked and turned into an open Android ereader. Even if someone does develop an easy hack, the limited hardware (no card slot, limited RAM, slow CPU) would keep us from doing much with it.

As I pointed out on Wednesday night, there are better options for Android ereaders. They don’t have the 300ppi screen like the Glowlight Plus, but they make up for it in other ways. Icarus, for example, has 6″ ereaders which will let you install Android apps (no hacking required).

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Comments


Frank October 23, 2015 um 11:50 am

The specs match the Voyage and Paperwhite (3rd gen) specs. However, the upcoming Voyage 2 will likely have better specs.


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