[Nook Color General] Michael.Rose:
The Nook Touch has some very serious untapped potential.

I have to say the Nook Touch is one of my favorite computing devices. It ranks high up there with my all time favorites; like the Atari 800, Newton, and HP TC1000/11000. It is a unique experience to have a great general computing device that is extremely portable, battery life is extraordinary, and I can read it comfortably in any lighting condition except complete darkness. A small reading light solves the darkness issue and is much preferred over blinding me with an overly bright backlight or OLED display. Those criticizing modifying it because it has an e-ink screen are completely missing the point that to many of us is precisely the reason why we want to do so! We all know e-ink doesn't handle animation well or video at all. However, it is what it can do so well that it does so much better than everything else.

So far I am love the device as a basic e-reader. Epub documents are obviously very well supported. It is a pleasure to read on this device.

I wish it had better native PDF handling, but that is largely a limitation of the PDF format. Most PDFs typically don't reflow very well and are designed to preserve the original look and layout. The best way to meet this requirement is simply a larger screen, because any of the page zooming methods are just not satisfactory on a slow screen refreshing device. I am not happy with the various alternative PDF viewers on this yet, but I am hoping someone will come with something. A Nook Touch that was at least twice the size would be great and I do wish someone would bring a device out with the pixel density of the current eInk screen, but in a 8.5x11" format. In the meantime, we need a better PDF reader for it.

I have loaded various other applications such as: Amazon Android App Market, Kindle, Amazon Shopping App, K9, News and Weather (Genie), Chess, Evernote, etc... and they are all working beautifully so far. The Kindle app would need to be optimized a bit for eInk, but installing this was largely just an exercise and I have no real need for it. I am happy with the Nook market place and already have a significant collection of epubs from other sources.

I think this device can be very useful to compliment other computing devices. I would think it would make for a great Boxee/GoogleTV/YouTube remote for the controlling those respective devices/apps running on a TV/Home Theater. It would beat the pants off many of the dedicated home automation remotes, it won't eat batteries, I can use it outside, and it works over Wifi for complete coverage from room to room. It also has Bluetooth under the hood; it just needs to be enabled. There is so much potential in this area.

The IR touch works better far than I anticipated. I don't really thinking signing applications would work terribly well, but some doodling with a soft tip and thicker stylus are acceptable. You could use the Nook Touch as a trackpad gesture based input device with a laptop on the go or desktop at home. I would love to see the eInk screen being used as a custom interface input device. You could have contextual based icons and menus on the touch screen working with your desktop applications and games. Just think: a Mini DIY version of the Optimus Tactus http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus-tactus/. I would love to use this as a touch pad instead of the pesky, drifting trackpoint on my laptop when I am at a desk or table somewhere. It could act as a desktop calculator/numeric keypad input device too. We need to be able to use the device while it is connected to computer over USB to communicate/charge.

There are so many other ideas and uses, I could go on all day. This device needs a dedicated forum on XDA, otherwise we are just going to have a mess of posts all over the Nook Color Forums. We need a general Nook group with sub-forums for the various devices. This thing has the pretty much all the same underlying hardware as the Nook Color, so there is going to be overlap in development, but how the device can be utilized because it has eInk, means it is going to be used differently and applications have to be designed accordingly to make the best use of the screen technology.

And once again, I love this thing!