B&N Nook

 

I'm loving my new B&N Nook! I've been wanting one of these ever since I first heard of E-ink, which seems like almost 10 years ago now. I never got the Amazon Kindle though. It seemed too expensive and was too locked down. The nook however is fairly open. You can install books from many sources, including PDFs I'd already downloaded. In fact you can read any book free as long as you're getting B&N store wifi, which would be more awesome for me if I lived near a B&N. Perhaps most attractive to me though: it is running the Android OS. I hope this means a future of innovation and even more openness.

Some thoughts so far:

• It's quite an adjustment to have a large screen on a device that is not a touch screen. THe iPhone has ruined me for this. I'm glad it does have the mini color touch screen at the bottom though. If the entire UI was through mechanical buttons it would feel extremely clunky.
• That color touch screen is distractingly bright compared to the unlit display screen. I quickly turned the brightness down to its near lowest setting. This will probably help with the battery life as well.
• I like that you can install your own images for the screensaver and wallpaper (see image above). It took me some trial and error to figure out exactly how to get that working. You need to make sure the images are already black and white before installing them. Also to make screensavers available, you need to create a folder inside of the "my screensavers" folder and place them there.
• I really wish there was a way to annotate pages. I read a lot of nonfiction and I would like to be able to place my notes within the document. See my better bookmark for paper books. Maybe there is and I just haven't figured it out yet.

Comments

[Bjorn]

Hey Dav, definitely agree that the Nook is sleeker than the Kindle and Android is a big plus. What about the page turn lag? Also, any idea how easy software updates will be?

[dav]

The page turn lag is definitely noticeable, but I got used to it pretty quick. i actually didn't compare that to the kindle yet. Is there a big difference?

Where the lag -does- suck though, is when the Nook somehow forgets what page you were on, so that when you reactivate it from sleep or off mode, you have to manually click forward a number of pages. This happened to me today and I was about 30 pages behind where I should have been. I started clicking faster than it updated and ended up way overshooting because even though it takes a second or two for each page turn, it was buffering all the clicks I was doing (like 3-4 a second).

This forgetting-what-page-you-are-on is by far the biggest annoyance for me because it happens quite often. I am assuming though that this will be fixed shortly by a software update.