Dirt cheap e-ink Android tablets

[David Court]

It's intriguing to see that the B&N Nook Simple Touch tablet is now dirt cheap - £29 in the UK, and presumably a similar price (about $45?) in the US.  Reports suggest that it's easy to root into a full-fledged touchscreen Android tablet (perhaps lacking sound).

I'm wondering whether an e-ink display could be a good thing in the field - much better in bright sunshine.  Obviously the refresh rate isn't going to be great, but perhaps it's good enough for a slowly-updated GCS status screen.

Any thoughts?  Has anyone actually tried it?

-Dave

P.S. I'm still intending to get stuck into coding some enhancements for Mavelous, but life's been pretty crazy recently holding down 2 jobs, and having to rebuild my tricopter after a major crash.  One other thing I do want to play with if I get the time is using a Bluetooth 4.0 to serial bridge to try to get mavlink data directly to modern iOS devices, which looks like a potentially promising approach - vaguely similar to Fighting Walrus, I guess, but without needing a wired connection.

[David Court]

Well, I couldn't resist picking one up at these silly prices.

Once rooted (using NookManager, in my case) the default browser does a very good job of handling mavelous - it seems to work just as well as on my iPhone 5.

The eInk display works fairly well - obviously, very usable in sunlight, which is a bonus, and it handles screen refreshes fairly well.  The regular flip to inverse video as it does a full refresh of the eInk can be a bit distracting, and I suspect that the map would look better in 'just the streets' view rather than satellite imagery.  Overall though, it looks pretty good.

The touchscreen on the nook is also very good - a lot more responsive than I'd have expected.

Photo attached as proof... :)