Fixing the Nook Tablet and Others

The Nook tablet from Barnes & Noble is appealling in price,  size, and operating system.

It goes on sale for as little as $30, fits easily in a pocket, and runs the pure Android system from Google, as compared with the Kindle tablets.

It can do phoning with Hangouts where there is Wi-Fi,  and do it a lot cheaper than a big iPhone.

The problem is that it has woefully little memory…

Think of RAM memory as oxygen,  and application memory as body parts.

The use of both needs to be maximized, while the basic minimum apps still need to be installed.

These include Amazon Buying and eBay, Pandora, Spotify, Kindle, an internal music player, and maybe a news app like Microsoft News and/or Google News.   A better alternative to the last would be to have news delivered by email,

Without these, the Nook does not offer enough to be bothered carrying around.

Installing Opera Mini as a browser will not only speed up browsing but also give access to Amazon and eBay without needing to use memory to install them.

Amazon Kindle needs to be installed first.    Now we can have all our books with us and not two devices.

We need actually to uninstall Nook itself.     Don't worry, we are going to reinstall it as an app and save a 100mb  in the process. We do want Barnes & Noble to stay alive in competition with Amazon.

We then need a little known but essential app from Google called Google Go Files.     This app will clean memory as needed, and without the delay of other apps with commercials.

In order to do voice browsing we need the Google Voice app as well.

Where websites are designed to fit on our tablet, we need simply to load them and save them to our home screen where they appear like any other app.

(One concern about the Nook specifically is that we need to be very careful adding memory.    If not done carefully, the memory will slide past the memory slot and disappear inside the device.)

Otherwise older tablets may need a similar approach to the Nook..

Whereas the Nexus 7 2013 still does not need special efforts to run well,  its original predecessor, the 2012, is also burdened with too little memory.

It can benefit from such an approach, especially the Google Go Files app.

Older smartphones can be revived the same way.