I returned yesterday from the Barnes & Noble launch event for NOOKcolor (see attached picture of me with Ravi Gopalakrishnan, the VP of software development at Barnes & Noble). As a member of the team that helped bring this product to market, it was quite the thrill to witness the audience’s positive reaction. This innovative full-color touch Reading Tablet brings to consumers an experience we’ve never seen before—disrupting the market with an immersive, interactive, vibrant & rich multimedia eReading experience.


NOOKcolor runs on TI’s OMAP3621 (ARM Cortex-A8 processor-based) applications processor—a member of the OMAP™ 3 processor family that was optimized for the consumer market. OMAP3621 delivers a robust, multitasking environment required to simultaneously run the eReader’s new feature-rich applications, which exercise the CPU, multimedia and graphics engines.

 

NOOKcolor represents the very first commercial launch of a reading-centric product using TI’s OMAP hardware and Android software architecture that we announced at CES 2010. And, today’s announcement is a prime example of how the OMAP 3 technology’s power and performance capabilities are leveraged in new consumer markets.

 

Collaborating on Engineering Challenges

TI’s systems application engineers from the consumer business line worked closely with Barnes & Noble’s product development team to support the integration of key multimedia-intensive reading applications.


Video playback in reading applications posed some technical challenges, particularly with integration. The TI team helped tune the Android multimedia framework and TI OMX components to improve multimedia performance. This also exposed a new scenario: TI’s hardware accelerated codecs had to quickly support a “call to destroy a video playback instantiation” before “creation was successful”, since a user can flip to a new page without completely watching the embedded video clip.


The OMAP3621 power efficiency also required optimization to meet the vibrant color demands of NOOKcolor. Bigger TFT displays and higher power backlight LEDs drive a need to optimize overall platform power.


What’s more, rich 2D & 3D graphics rendering combined with simultaneous video playback of embedded video clips drove new complex multimedia use cases with intense power demands. We met those demands with more of TI’s proven power savings techniques borrowed from our Smartphone software releases.


All in all, the NOOKcolor eReader that consumers will now hold in their hands is an incredible testament to the power of partner collaboration and unique vision driven by Barnes & Noble. It was an exciting project to be a part of and we’re looking forward to more great things from the Barnes & Noble team!


Tell us what you think about NOOKcolor by commenthing here...

 

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