What are your thoughts on the Nook? I like the physical design. Less Danish-PlaySkool than the Kindle. What kind of technology is the color display at the bottom? What is it used for in practice?

I'll chime in here as I to have B&N nook. I love it. The display at the bottom is a touch screen and is used for menu navigation and turing the page. It's a LCD capacitive touchscreen.

Before the first firmware revision the unit was a little sluggish but that has been mostly fixed. It does seem to get a little wonky when you first turn on the 3G services. I almost always have it in airplane mode and just turn on the wireless wifi at the start of the day to get any updated material and then turn it back off.

Battery power seems to be a bit less than advertised, but I rarely go more than a few days without charging it so I can't really say.

nookdevs.com is a site that provides instructions on how to root the device but I have not done that.

Overall I like the nook. There were two big selling points that convinced me to get one over the Kindle. The first was the LCD at the bottom, and the second was support for ePub and PDF. If I'm going to buy digital media, I don't want to be locked into one companies format, so the Kindle book format was a big turnoff for me. With the nook, I can buy from Barnes & Noble, the Sony eBook store, or any other site that offers ePub.

petteri explained the LCD at the bottom, though the device does offer physical buttons on the side for page turning as well. The display does try to turn off pretty quickly, so it becomes just a solid non distracting black space at the bottom once you get into a book.

PDF rendering on it is ok, but suffers a bit from the small screen size. It works well enough though, and adding a document is just a simple drag and drop to the documents folder. The nook also exposes the full book storage over USB, so I could back up the files if I wanted, or add them in without directly downloading them on the device. It also has a music player that can play MP3, but no AAC support currently. The built in speaker is ok, but long term, headphones would probably be better.

As petteri said, the 1.1 firmware update fixed a lot of the sluggishness reviewers commented about. That update came out on the day I got my nook back in late December. I'll be curious to see how quickly they roll out additional updates to either add functionality or improve the speed a little more.

I too haven't rooted mine, but the hacker community is quite active. With the base system running Android, many people are finding ways to run existing apps like a browser or mail client on it. And none of the hacks require opening the device, it's just a matter of using the microSD slot on the back, along with a specifically crafted update file to enable root access.

Well, the Kindle supports .mobi, which is a reasonably open standard, and you can convert EPUBs to .mobi without too much effort. The DX supports PDF, which supports Amazon's claim that the resolution on the original was simply too low to make viewing PDFs feasible.

If the Nook had been available when I got my Kindle, I definitely would have considered it strongly.

The Kindle 2, the one with the internal battery, also supports PDF. It's not too smart about metadata (on the list of books, it shows up with its filename), but it does work just fine.

The difference for me was the native support, including DRM protected ePub files. All the books I have downloaded from Barnes and Noble have been ePub so far, and they are using Adobe's DRM system. This allows me to keep the books I've bought even if I decide to buy a Sony reader, or a number of other devices on the market as well. The Kindle seems to only download books from Amazon in their proprietary AZW format.

I can definitely see the appeal of the Kindle prior to the Nook's release though, and nearly did pick one up. Long term, I hope ebooks move to a standard format across the board. Sony moving from their proprietary format to ePub was a big step in helping that to happen.

AZW is essentially the same thing as mobi with a couple of byte changes as I recall. Amazon has owned mobipocket since 2005 and they could have just used the mobi format on the Kindle unmodified. Guess they didn't want to make their books compatible with other mobipocket clients out there (even though DRM would have prevented that from happening on at least the free clients). While it's a free format, ePub is both free and open.

I think we're still some time away from seeing how all these formats shake out, including an agreement on a single format. Along with reader pricing, this (portability and future-proofing) is one of the big stumbling blocks to wide acceptance of digital books, IMO.

BTW, do the latest Nook updates make it as quick as the Kindle 2?

Yeah. They don't want you using Kindle books elsewhere and they don't want you using ebooks from other stores on the Kindle.

AZW is a Mobi file with a flag set differently in the header. The other difference is that the Kindle PID has a * instead of the regular $ that a Mobi device PID has e.g. 1234567*AB vs 1234567$AB.

People have managed to load DRMed Mobi books into the Kindle by registering the Kindle PID with the store and then patching the book file to turn on that flag. Amazon don't like you doing this so have made it harder to find the Kindle PID.

Holy shit, the Nook comes with a f*cking manual telling you how to unbox it:

http://gizmodo.com/5462333/unpacking-the-nook-is-a-7-step-process

Wow. Apparently it's a challenge even with the instructions.

Okay, that's weird.

Yeah, unboxing it did take a bit of effort. The device was very snug in the plastic casing, and it did probably take me about 2-3 minutes to get it out, without applying force that I thought would break something.

ISTR Acorn had instructions telling how to sit at the desk properly.

Apparently B&N are not part of the "Frustration-free packaging" movement. Yeesh!

New Nook color announced for November. Looks good. It actually looks like (by far) the best tablet after the iPad. 7" IPS LCD with 8GB of memory and WiFi for $250. That price is going to potentially rock other tablet manufacturers, depending on the rest of the software bundle.

It's running Android, but I've only seen the B&N-created book/extras UI right now. Maybe there's no access to any sort of Android UI.

So far the book buying and reading application looks like it's received a very nice make-over. A lot has been stolen from Apple and other iPad/Pod apps here.



Update... Looks like it's going to support apps. At least for developers who want to write for it using their SDK. I suspect it wouldn't take a great deal to port over a standard Android app to run within Nook's framework. Hopefully B&N has more scrutiny over what apps look like compared to Google and Apple - most of the apps for Android and iPhone look like crap.

This could really upset other 7" tablets. B&N has a much better name than most of the other competitors. Especially since it's going to be sold at B&N, Walmart, Best Buy and a couple of other smaller places.

I was hoping they were going to use a Pixel Qi screen instead of a normal LCD. Definitely an unexpected competitor in the tablet space in any case, though I'm guessing the Nook is going to be underpowered compared to the Samsung Tab and other Android tablets.

They probably wanted to use something that actually exists and will be released in the lifetime of their current customers. Seriously, I'm not holding my breath to actually see anything on the shelf from those Pixel Qi guys.

The OLPC uses one but thats not really something you can get off the shelf. They've made a kit that lets you replace the LCD in certain netbooks as well.

The OLPC doesn't use the new product(s) Pixel Qi are supposed to be working on. The screen in the One was created by the same people, but prior to them forming the PIxel Qi company. I'm strictly talking about the vapour product they've had just about ready for the past two years. And which if I'm not mistaken, announced, then scrapped to start over. I was under the impression it was not what they had available in the retail sample kit.

If it is, it must not be very good, since I haven't seen any crazy over-the-top press about it.

Ahh okay. The sample kit is marked with evaluation only and has no guarantee/warranty! People who buy that kit at basically ending up as beta testers.

The whole Pixel Qi arrangement is just confusing. It sounds slightly dubious anyway that the founder used to work for OLPC where they came up with this technology but then resigned and started their own company...

The UI responsiveness is looking a little sad, including the touch input with jerky & slow animation and scrolling:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/10/26/hands-on-with-the-nook-color/

Maybe it's something they can address in software, but I doubt it will be in the first release since it ships on Nov 19th. But maybe it's all down to the processor and graphics core on the product. I don't think that spec was mentioned anywhere.

They'll need to improve this to better compete with other Android 7" devices.

The UI paradigms and features look very god though. It still needs some polish, especially the views where you select tiles (media items and folders) - it needs some animation. See previous paragraph for why it might not be present.

I think a B&N app with these features would be killer for the iPad. Obviously it isn't going to be able to be quite as rich as it won't have its own set of extra apps, nor would they likely be able to have it run purchases through the app itself.

"backlit screen". Do not want.