Simple. Smart. A review of the new Nook Color
January 28, 2011
There's been a lot of hype about the iPad and tablets, but before Apple's venture Amazon.com launched the Kindle, and helped open up the eReader market.
Given the iPad is only a year old, the device has had a big impact on media consumption, I think it's a truly innovative device. But not everyone can afford tablets, or may want to use the lower cost eReaders for different purposes than a tablet. eReaders for reading books; and tablets for surfing the web and reading online magazine apps.
eReaders certainly have a future, but there's competition beyond the Kindle. Barnes & Noble's Nook. Here's a guest article about the Nook from a friend in content marketing, Matt Mullen, a freelance writer, who has a background in writing, editing and public relations.
Enjoy.
- John
I fancy myself a competent player in our digital age, but I sometimes become frustrated by the tendency of manufacturers to drop a lethally complicated device in your lap with an instruction manual that, in 247 pages, still manages to avoid guidance on the most basic of operations.
Take a recent battle with my digital video camera. After reading the manual, I felt sure the camera had enough features to make my unsteadily shot home movies look like the sequel to “Avatar,” but the instructions didn’t mention how to get anything to play back in my DVD player, which to me seemed a pretty critical element in a camera package. After an hour of research and the download of a couple of software programs that crashed my computer, my biopic, “The Deviled Egg and I: One Man’s Love Affair With Thanksgiving Dinner,” remains solely available for screening on my laptop.
In light of that experience, it’s refreshing to say that, after receiving the new Barnes & Noble Nook Color as a Christmas gift, I’ve discovered that I really like it, primarily because it’s simple to operate but also because it’s a cheap and easy way to get classic books, it’s a capable magazine reader and it makes a great device for reading the newspaper.
On opening the package, feeling slightly glum over the obligation to learn to use another new high-tech device, I was greeted with a “Quick Start Guide” which spelled out, in simple terms, how to turn the Nook on, charge it, hook it up to my Wi-Fi and register an account with B&N. I found that the touch-screen based navigation was intuitive and easy-to-use. I had it all set up in about 20 minutes. Nothing crashed, and I felt hopeful.
O.K., so then I wanted to read something. I soon discovered that between B&N and Google Books, there are thousands, maybe millions, of free books to download. It’s easy to find a no-cost version of many books in the public domain (primarily books published prior to 1923) and it takes just a quick search and a tap on the screen for them to appear in your “library.” In minutes, I had copies of classics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Mark Twain and more.
This has remained for me the best part of the e-reader experience, and I’ve found all sorts of useful information out there. I was delighted to discover a short promotional pamphlet published by the Raleigh, N.C., Chamber of Commerce in 1894, which declared happily that the middle regions of the state were found to be “remarkably salubrious and healthful—only along some few rivers being found any degree of deleterious malarial influence.” In the authors’ enthusiasm for the region, they also compare the topography of the state to a “gracefully reclining” naked goddess.
Over the next couple of days, I explored some of the Nook’s other features. It offers free trials of many magazine titles, and I thought I’d try out GQ because I am a gentleman, or try to be occasionally. In about a minute, the Nook downloaded the current issue, concerned primarily with men’s spring fashions, to my library. At least for this particular issue, the presentation was a straightforward electronic representation of the magazine, which reproduced nicely on the full-color display. This issue didn’t have many interactive features, which I would have liked to see more of, and reading smaller text required additional magnification with the screen’s pinch-to-zoom feature. But for instantly downloading single issues of titles for research or periods of airport boredom, the Nook is a nice thing to have. (If you’re curious, all the gentleman are to said to be wearing plaid ties, colorful khakis and fluffy-looking scarves this spring.)
Next, I wanted to see what reading a newspaper would be like, so I snagged the latest issue of the Wall Street Journal for a buck. Unlike GQ, this wasn’t a direct visual representation of the issue; the Nook version of the paper is formatted for the e-reader. I could see where someone would switch from print to a dedicated e-subscription. The newspaper e-reading experience is similar to print, involving mostly text, but it sure does seem more convenient than having to fuss around with all that paper. Again, the color screen comes in handy here for photos and charts, although I had some trouble zooming in to read some of the smaller charts.
Other points worth noting:
• The Nook Color has a web browser and makes a great device for casual browsing where you have Wi-Fi access.
• It has a backlit screen. This is nice because it doesn’t keep my wife up at night when I want to read. I was worried about eye fatigue with the LCD screen, but haven’t noticed a problem reading for an hour or two. At least for now, however, I may stick to print for long, weighty pieces, such as Russian novels or video camera instruction manuals.
• The Nook is based on the Android operating system, and while you can’t use the Android Market of apps for it, B&N is said to be developing its own app market to be released soon.
Care to share any comments about the Nook Color or other e-readers? I haven’t owned the Nook for long, but I’d be happy to answer any questions about my experience so far.