Something new, but not bought

I've had a Nook Color HD+ tablet for just over 2 years now and its been kind of a constant disappointment. It replaced a first generation Kindle Fire and while it seemed like a great tablet on paper it never really lived up to my expectations. The worst was when I first got it the OS was a Barnes and Noble special version of Android that only ran a few apps with no way to load any they hadn't allowed. That only lasted a few months before they opened to the whole Google Play store but the tablet was still much slower than it seemed like it ought to be.

The last couple weeks its degraded to the point that it was basically unusable, apps took forever to open, my email wouldn't mark as read, I couldn't browse the web or watch YouTube, about the only thing it was good for was playing Risk. I couldn't even really read with it, the Kindle app would freak out constantly. As a last ditch effort I downloaded "Advanced Task Killer" since it would work a little better if I paged through all the apps and turned off anything I absolutely didn't need.

Today I spent HOURS figuring out how to root the tablet and install Cyanomod 10.2.1 which brings me to a standard base Android install without any extra crap mucking up the works. There are still a couple things like Google Hangouts that I don't need or want but considering the Nook has become a ROCKET SHIP I don't mind much.

Seriously, not only is it like a new tablet, its like a new tablet made by a company that actually knows how to make good tablets. For the first time ever I can watch YouTube videos in HD without it pausing. I'd always thought it was pausing because I have crappy internet but it turns out it was having trouble playing the frame size, now its no problem at all. Errors I'd had in my Risk game are gone too and I can actually browse to websites without falling asleep waiting.

I did back up the B&N OS before I started but I'm never going to go back to it. I was so happy I even ordered a 32GB SD card to replace the 16GB I had. I'm scheduled for a trip to the Philippines in a couple weeks and now I'll be able to take a whole bunch of videos with space to spare.

Supposedly this will help with the lackluster battery life I'd been experiencing but it'll be a couple days before I can report on that.