I have had my old HTC Dream sitting around collecting dust for months. I have been trying to come up with a cool use for it for months. After all that time I think I finally came up with a good use: running a small Conky status display on it via VNC.

How to do it

Install a VNC server and Conky:

apt-get install vnc4server conky-all

I am running Ubuntu and chose to install the VNC version 4 server. This ought to work on Debian as well.

Download and install my Conky configuration file and VNC xstartup file:

wget http://blog.patshead.com/Assets/conky-phone/conkyrc-phone -O ~/.conkyrc
mkdir ~/.vnc
wget http://blog.patshead.com/Assets/conky-phone/xstartup ~/.vnc/xstartup
chmod +x ~/.xstartup

Then fire up the VNC server:

vnc4server -geometry 480x320 :10

If all goes well there should be a VNC server waiting for a connection on port 5910. I am currently using the Mocha Lite VNC client on my phone. It is the second client I tried and I am not very happy with it. If I end up finding this hack useful I will probably try to hunt down a better client. I'd like one that will let me disable the status bar and hide the mouse pointer.

My Conky configuration is rather boring. I just trimmed, condensed, and slightly expanded on an old configuration I used to use a long time ago. It is quite utilitarian.

How useful is this?

I am not entirely sure how useful this is going to be, I haven't been running this for very long. It has already kept me from having to fire up htop a few times already.

I would like to come up with a good way to attach the phone to my monitor stand if I actually end up finding it useful.

CyanogenMod 7-RC4 dropped just a few days ago and it is a very exciting release as far as the Nook Color is concerned. As of release candidate four, CyanogenMod is officially supporting the Nook Color and hardware acceleration of video and OpenGL is now working.

CyanogenMod 7-RC4 is the first firmware I burned to the internal flash memory. Everything went pretty smoothly. I only made one mistake that slowed me down, I tried to use Clockwork Recover 3.0.0.6. You have to use 3.0.1.0 to install CyanogenMod.

It is probably one of the safest Android devices that we have. It always attempts to boot off of the microSD card first. If there is no boot loaded there it will attempt to boot off of the internal flash.

The tablet seems to run a bit smoother now. I'm not entirely certain if this is because the internal flash is more efficient than my microSD card or if is improvements to the firmware.

Video playback capabilities of the Nook Color

It looks like the PowerVR 530 in the Nook Color can accelerate H.264 baseline profile video with a resolution up to 848x480. It would have been nice to be able to play back some pixel perfect 1024x600 video, but this isn't bad at all.

I've encoded a few videos with HandBrake. I started with the "Apple Universal" HandBrake preset and tweaked up the settings a bit to get better looking video with smaller file sizes. I exported my Nook Color presets just in case anyone wants to download them. I'm pretty happy with the results with the RF set to around 20 or 21.

My Galaxy S phone has no trouble playing back 720p H.264 high profile video files, not that it has that much resolution anyway. I'll probably just encode all my portable videos for the Nook Color since most of my devices can play those just fine.

Nook Color HandBrake Presets File

I've been wanting a better [Android] tablet for quite a while now. I've had the Eken M001 for quite a while now, but it isn't a very usable tablet (especially after I bricked it). The battery doesn't last long, the resistive touch screen absolutely horrible, and it is quite slow.

I've been hoping to see a tablet with a good capacitive touch screen for under $300. I saw a tweet the other day mentioning that Bluetooth was now working on Cyanogenmod 7 running on the Nook Color. I did some quick research and decided I just had to buy one.

I apologize in advance for the horribly shaky video footage.

The Hardware

The hardware isn't that far behind the Samsung Galaxy Tab. The Nook Color is about the same size as the Tab, has a similar 1024x600 IPS LCD display, and they both have 512 MB of RAM. The Nook Color ships with the CPU clocked at 800 mhz, 200 mhz slower than the Tab. I've been running mine overclocked to 1 ghz without any problems so far, so this isn't a problem.

The Nook Color has a PowerVR 530 GPU, the Galaxy Tab has a PowerVR 540 GPU. I'm not sure how much of a difference there is between the two chips, but I do know that I don't have any software on my Galaxy S phone that can push its PowerVR 540 to its limits.

The biggest problem with the Nook Color is the lack of hardware buttons... There are workarounds for the lack of menu and back buttons but I find myself always reaching for the missing hardware buttons.

The Nook Color is also missing a few other features that most of the other tablets have. It has no cameras and it has no video output capabilities. It also lacks GPS, but this seems normal for most of the wifi only tablets.

The Stock Firmware

The Android firmware that ships loaded on the device is very limited. It has a book reader, web browser, and a few games. That's about all that is there. It sounds like there are ways to load third party software but I didn't investigate those.

Running Third Party Firmware

Hacking the Nook Color is surprisingly simple, it will boot directly off of a properly partitioned and formatted microsd card. All you have to do is correctly write one of the many available sd bootable images to a microsd card, stick it in the tablet, and power it up.

For the last few days I've been running an sd bootable image of Cyanogenmod 7 that I found on the xda forums. It has been running quite well so far.

There are a few Problems

Video playback performance is poor. I'm hoping this will improve but I'm not going to bet on it.

Update 2011-03-21: I played back a few standard definition videos using the stock firmware. They played perfectly without any frame dropping.

Update 2011-03-24: It sounds like the PowerVR 530 GPU in the Nook Color can accelerate video with a resolution of up to 848x480.

Update 2011-03-31: CyanogenMod 7 RC4 now has working hardware accelerated video playback! Youtube, Flash, and mpeg4 files all play back perfectly.

Some apps that try to use GPS crash. Weatherbug and Speedtest.net are the two apps that crashed on me. Google Maps runs without any trouble, though.

The touch screen isn't perfect. It seems to have problems picking up button presses around the edges, especially up in the top right hand corner. I haven't tried booting up the stock firmware to see if the problem exists there as well.

Update 2011-04-05: I've been running the CM7 tablet tweaks build for a few days now. Moving the status bar to the bottom makes the problems I had with the touch screen a non issue. It sounds like this work will be rolled up into the CM7 core before too long.

Is it worth the price?

I think the Nook Color is a very good deal. It is half the price of the most comparable tablets and I feel that it provides way more than half the value.

This one is actually for my girlfriend to use. I'm already thinking about buying another one for myself...

I've been fairly unhappy with the battery life of my G1. With the stock 1150mAh battery I am lucky to get 12 hours out of it most of the time. I was once able to use 49% of my battery in an hour and a half by driving to a doctor's office and surfing the web in the waiting room... Bluetooth was at the top of the list of battery consumers, so be sure to turn that off if you don't need it.

I found a cheap 2300mAh battery at dealextreme.com. I've ordered lots of cheap gadgets and cables from them in the past, so I figured it'd be worth spending $11.22 at this battery to try it out. They ship their items, slowly, from Hong Kong. I think it took between about 3 weeks to get the battery.

How long does it last?

I haven't actually run it down to empty yet. The first day I had it I ran it down to 25% in a little over 19 hours. I had everything enabled except Bluetooth. I watched a little over an hour of video, listened to some SHOUTcast radio with Tunewiki, played a bunch of games, read email, and surfed the web. I tried to use the phone as often as I could. That last 25% should easily have put it over 24 hours, but I was tired and I needed a full battery for the next day.

Just how big is that thing, anyway?

I looked at a lot of batteries. Nobody seems to give dimensions. Unfortunately, I don't have anything terribly accurate like a caliper to measure this thing with. I did come up with an easy way to convey the difference in thickness between the stock battery cover and this new battery cover.

The top part of the battery cover that sits over the camera is probably identical in thickness to the stock battery cover. Just below the camera it gets thicker and it maintains that thickness all the way to the bottom of the phone. I was able to stack 3 pennies on the shallow side of the cover and it came out pretty flush with the deep side. My good friend Wikipedia tells me that a United States Penny is 1.55mm thick.

My math tells me that the thickness of my phone has increased from 17.1mm to about 21.75mm. That puts it just a smidge under the thickness of my old Treo 650. I think I can live with that.

Is it heavy? Does the cover fit well?

I may not have a caliper handy but I do have access to a shipping scale! The stock battery came out at 25g, the beefy new battery came out at 45g.

The first time I put the cover on the phone it didn't feel like it was going to fit. I may have had to press it on a little harder but it fits very snugly with no gaps anywhere.

Update 2010-01-06:

My phone has mostly been sitting idle the last few days and I forgot to put it on the charger last night. The battery use applet is showing that I've been unplugged for a few minutes shy of 39 hours with 29% capacity remaining. The three biggest battery wasters seem to be Cell Standby, Bluetooth, and Phone Idle all clocking in at 29%. Wi-Fi clocked in at 9%, Voice Calls at 6%, and Display at 2%. I was on the phone for about 45 minutes.

All the power wasting goodies were turned on, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Sync. It probably helps that I live about a quarter of a mile from a cell tower.

The single most disappointing application that came installed on my T-Mobile G1 was the default email application. The very first thing I noticed was the horrendous IMAP support. I have a very well organized mail account. I might have a have dozen or so folders at the top of my folder hierarchy. The Android email application just flattens out all of my 100+ sub folders out into a huge, difficult to navigate list.

K-9 Mail

My search for a better mail app lead me to K-9 Mail. K-9 is a fork of the stock Android email application with quite a few improvements.

K-9 still flattens out my folder list but lets me choose which folders I would like to display and sync. Fortunately, I really only want quick access to five or six folders while I'm on the go.

Push Email

The beta release of K-9 supports the IMAP IDLE feature. This allows it to stay connected to the IMAP server so that it can instantly be notified when a new message arrives. This is much better for me than waiting up to 5 minutes to see a new message arrive.

Improved Message List

K-9's message list view is a huge improvement over the stock mail client. The view is much more condensed and looks like it fits about twice as many messages on the screen at the same time.

So far there is only one ChatterEmail feature that I miss. It had a summary view that displayed emails from multiple mailboxes on one screen in chronological order. Each message was color coded so that you could very easily tell which account each message belonged to. I saw a few mentions of ChatterEmail in the K-9 issue tracker, so I know I'm not the only one who misses this feature.