After seeing my Nook Color running Cyanogen-mod, my wife was envious.  So it being close to the Christmas season we sat down to find a suitable tablet for her.  Now there is a little history behind her and her computers.  She had an early EEEpc net book that we bought at Target for $100 (I think) and it worked OK for her for a while but it was slow and really slow to wake up.  I had another net book that she glommed onto and it worked ok for her for  awhile, but she still coveted my Lenovo Think Pad (which no way was I gonna give up!).  So in the search for a suitable tablet we went to the Lenovo web site to see what they had as far as tablets.

We weren’t looking to spend a bunch of money and the Lenovo was well priced…$220.  We ordered it up and they said it would ship on the 25th of November, well we had the thing on the 23rd!  Pretty good as far as shipping is concerned!

Upon removing it from the packaging, it is a very nice piece of equipment, minimalist amount of documentation and stuff that comes with it but not surprising given the price point.  Lenovo doesn’t have much of anything as far as accessories for the A1…so a quick trip over to Amazon found a nice cover specifically made for the A1.  After a bit of familiarization she got used to the touch interface of the tablet.  One annoyance was that an error kept popping up about the calendar…a quick google search using the error message gave a solution that worked and the issue has yet to return.

I was a bit concerned when I went to the forums for the A1 as they were somewhat negative with issues that people were having…suffice it to say, other than that one error which has been fixed she hasn’t had an issue with it since.  One niggle that was a bit of a downer is that the USAA app does not work on the A1, no idea why as it works on my Nook.  She is really happy with the A1, and has it loaded up with the apps she needs to do the banking, check email and play games.  It’s instant on and does all she wants it to do.

I give it my highest rating, though of course YMMV!

I purchased a Color Nook in the summer time with the thinking I would run Cyanogenmod on it as it is a perfect candidate for that type of modification.  Well life got in the way and I never did get around to doing it.  Maybe I was afraid of messing up the Nook as I was enjoying it as a book reader.  So, I had some time off here this week and decided it was time to mess with the Nook and see what CM7 was all about.

I had purchased a uSD card a while back to run CM7 on instead of going thru the whole issue of rooting the device and loading CM7 into the main memory.  I followed the instructions outlined on this post:  http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1000957 .  Really a pretty simple thing to do, even it you aren’t a computer geek.  Once I got everything set up it ran great!  I don’t know why I waited so long to do this!

The responsiveness of the screen to touch really is better than the standard Nook software, to say nothing of the increase in functionality of the device!  I installed the Nook App and it worked flawlessly, even downloading my current book and opening it to where I was in it already.   The music app found all of my music that I put on the Nook’s installed memory so no issues there.

I’ve been playing around with it for about 12 hours now and I’m really impressed.  Still want to figure out how to get rid of the ads on Angry Birds (I already bought it thru the Nook app market doesn’t that count for something?!?).  I’m sure there is a way by paying yet another $2.99 or something but hey I’m cheap!

This has really taken the Nook to the next level as an inexpensive tablet…I don’t think I’ll be going back to the way it was before!