We've seen a rooted Sony PRS-T1 e-reader defeat the black-to-white refresh flash that's common on E Ink displays, and now there's a similar hack for the Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch. Unlike the Sony, the Nook hack requires a rooted device as well as some extra code. Thankfully, this has been provided by xda-developers forum user marspeople. After installing, it takes a simple four-tap gesture to turn on the "no refresh" mode and your Nook becomes a smooth-scrolling, monochrome Android tablet — sort of.

While the hack offers a huge improvement in screen refresh rate, it does stutter significantly in a few spots and it's nowhere near as smooth as a full-fledged tablet. Compared to the PRS-T1, the Nook appears to keep text sharper in its no refresh mode, though it lacks the ability to use text-to-speech like the Sony. If current E Ink displays can be hacked to refresh this quickly, here's hoping the next generation performs like this out of the box.