on the fence...

[nikchik66]

so im wondering what to do...my nook tablet just died...totally died and i have 2 options...one have them replace it and try again with the nook tablet or two just return it and get a nook color or just plain get my money back...my mother in law has the tablet and she loves it, i liked mine while it worked and my dad has the nook color which he bought that n2a card and loves so much he decided not to save up for the ipad 3...i have been keeping up with the devs and it seems that a n2a card is in the works for the tablet, and that seems cool but which is the better device?

[TnTexas]

The answer depends on what you want to use it for. Do you want a regular tablet-esque experience with a large selection of apps? The Color with an n2a card is the way to go. Apps don't mean that much to you, but you do want to watch movies from Netflix and shows from Hulu+? The Tablet's probably the way to go since it has a faster processor and more memory for buffering. If you mainly want an ereader, you'd probably be satisfied with either one.

[nikchik66]

im thinking i want both. have you heard anything about the devs working on an n2a card for the tablet? my dad's color is really wicked with the n2a, i did see like last week or so they unlocked the boot loader and on the 12th a dev posted a pic of cwm running...do you see somehting like this for the tablet happening relativly soon or is that just wishful thinking?

[Eustace2]

I keep up on the posts at XDA and the possiblity of dual booting the NT or loading CM9 or some alternate software on it.  They are making good progress, but no one is announcing a release date for a dual boot card or CM9.  If you are comfortable with the tech, and it sounds like you are, you can get a good working Android tablet by rooting the NT and installing an alternate launcher.  There are instructions on the XDA forums that will walk you through the process.  I use the ADW launcher with Home Catcher app as my main screen and use the Nook Home app to flip to the "Nook look" when I want to.  I also added a 32GB SD card for content.  So, I  have created a workable 32GB tablet until CM9 is ready.  In fact, if I could solve a couple more problems, like getting a location in Googel Maps, I would be in no hurry to switch to CM9.

The NT is a good investment in solid hardware.  Even if we never get CM9, you can make it look and act like a real Android tablet with a few exceptions.  My vote, as if you couldn't tell, would be to get another NT.  If you didn't do that, I'd go with a straigh Android tablet.  The NC with an N2A card will give you a tablet experience too, but for $50 more, the NT is a much better option.

[roustabout]

The folks who make the n2a card have posted a bounty for a bootable SD card.   

Progress is moving on some kind of SD boot for the NT.  

But - if you do choose to use that, you may well need to modify your startup environment in a small way.  That means a couple of things:

- any change in the NC startup environment prevents the BN updates from working on it.  You would likely be unable to update your NT until  you could reverse those changes.  

- if there really do need to be files written to internal memory, they may be pretty hard to remove again, meaning that in addition to blocking the update, they have warranty implications that the n2a card does not. (If your display fails, for instance, removing those files will be much harder, if it was even possible to start with.  I don't know that it is a possibility, since the boot process is very different between the NC and NT.)  

One of the big sales points for the n2a card is that it has no impact on warranty.  

Alternate boot for the NT may have an impact.  Too early to say yet.