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Barnes & Noble’s Nook gets Angry Birds

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Barnes and Noble’s Nook Color device made a clear play to move from e-reader to tablet Monday by adding apps, including the popular game Angry Birds.

Pandora Internet radio, the recipe app Epicurious, the news app Pulse and the game Uno are among 125 apps available in the new Nook Apps store. Our Technology blog explains:

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The updates come as the Nook Color is being switched over to a newer version of Google’s Android operating system, called Froyo. Unlike the Honeycomb software, which was designed specifically to run on tablets, Froyo was designed for phones but is on many tablets, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab. But while the Nook Color can now run Android Froyo, it won’t be running all Android apps. Instead, Barnes & Noble is asking developers to optimize their apps for the Nook Color and submit them through the Nook Apps store, rather than simply allowing users to download apps from the Android Market.

In an important move for readers, a new social networking app called Nook Friends will allow Nook users to, our Technology blog writes, ‘see what their friends are reading, read reviews of books, loan books to each other, share quotes from a book, list their progress in a book and recommend a title to a buddy.’

That’s the kind of social reading that many publishers and developers have been talking about. The only problem is that it’s not platform-agnostic -- in other words, someone using their Nook has these robust sharing capacities only with other Nook users, not all other e-book readers.

However, one ubiquitous social networking tool is part of the new Nook color package. Hitting ‘like’ buttons next to specific titles in the Nook bookstore app will now show up on readers’ Facebook pages.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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