Review: Barnes & Noble Nook eReader

Okay… in lolcat-speak, as regards Barnes & Noble’s new ‘Nook’ eReader device, “I haz one.”

For better or worse, I was in the first bunch to get one, having pre-ordered early enough to get first dibs.  Better, in that I got one — and I understand these things are now going for up to twice their retail value on eBay, and current orders won’t ship for at least 6-7 weeks due to the backlog.

Worse, in that as an early adopter, I get to experience the various flaws and problems that come with a 1.0 release product.  On the other hand, I did avoid some, in that I wasn’t opening my Nook up and connecting to the registration servers for the first time on Christmas day, when I hear they melted down due to the load.  And to their credit, they’ve already released a point release upgrade on the Nook’s operating system, downloaded automatically via the device’s free 3G network or over wifi.

I’ll not bother with a review of features and stuff that you can see for yourself at the link at the top of this post.  Instead, I’ll just go over my own impression, what I’ve liked and haven’t liked.  This is my first eReader of any kind, aside from laptop computers and PC desktop software, so it took me a while to get used to it.

First, the tactile:  The Nook feels pretty good in the hand, or both hands.  I quite like the fact I can page forward or back using buttons on both sides of the device.  You can also page with finger-swipes across the touchscreen at the bottom, but I haven’t bothered with this method.  It doesn’t feel like a toy, and in fact the leather cover/protector I got for it just enhances the impression.

The visual: The electronic ink display is remarkably sharp and easy on the eyes — I can read for hours without eyestrain, and the ability to change the font (3 choices) and size (5 choices) is nice.  I also rather like the customization feature, in that I could load my own wallpaper (what displays when you’re not reading) and screensavers (what displays when the device is asleep but not off).  The small color touchscreen at the bottom is a nifty feature — I like it way better than the multitude of tiny buttons I see on Kindles… There my only complaint is it really shows finger oil smudges too easily and I find I’m frequently cleaning (maybe one of those iPod protectors would help, if trimmed to fit).

The functional:  I’ve already added 16GB of MicroSD RAM to my Nook, but it comes with 2GB and truthfully I haven’t even filled that yet, not even close.  But it’s nice to have that much space to expand into as I like.  It also supports a variety of book formats, including PDF, PDB, and EPUB — and with the tools I already have, I can turn just about everything I own (including some old Microsoft Reader LIT books, as well as my own Word docs) into PDFs the Nook can handle.

Actually, with Calibre, a free open-source utility, I can convert into any Nook supported format from just about anything else.  Calibre also has a feed-subscription feature that lets me compile online stuff for reading later on the Nook — although the only way to get it onto the Nook is via USB cable.  I’ve enjoyed reading NASA news releases, Scientific American, and a couple newspapers in this way.

The WiFi (b/g) and Wireless 3G capabilities are quite cool, downloading books I bought on B&N’s site automatically.  And it was a pleasant surprise one morning when I woke up the device and it began downloading the software update; additional goodness: I then turned on the WiFi (usually leave it off to conserve battery) and the Nook switched to using that much faster connection without my doing anything else.

The speed and responsiveness of the Nook, especially on page changes, was really not good in the initial release, but the software update fixed about 80% of that.  Unfortunately they then introduced a problem where a lot of people, myself included, experienced intermittent loss of bookmarks and last-read-point saved information.  Not good.  Word on their support site is they’re working on it, as well as a few other glitches people have reported.  Again — this is a 1.0 product and I have expectations accordingly.  I’m actually surprised it hasn’t been worse, and that although there have been some hardware issues and returned Nooks, the bulk of the problems are software based (and therefore fixable).

Areas for improvement:  For some reason, battery life isn’t what it ought to be — and others have reported this.  Not like a week between charges; for me, it’s been more like every 3rd day.

The page transitions could be smoother and faster.  The 1.1 software was a big improvement in this, but it could be better.

Three fonts and five sizes is nice…but this could be expanded upon in the future.  Also, it does need a zoom/pan feature, so you can look closer at illustrations and graphs.

They put a lot of effort into the design aesthetics and even the packaging for the Nook.  C’mon guys — throw in a 25-cent stick-on/removable smudge protector for that bottom touchscreen at least.

They definitely need to beef up the ability to organize a given ebook library, and there’s no reason why there is no organization at all in the non-BN section of what is stored on the device — none, not even alphabetical by title.  I think it sorts by the order in which you put it on the device, but I’m not sure.  Ideally, people should be able to set up categories, keywords, sub-libraries, that sort of thing.  BN-purchased books can be sorted by author, title, and so on — but I’d also like to sort by genre or keyword, or to browse just among a subset of books, among all my Nook-stored books.  My actual preference would be that the Nook let me mingle both BN and non-BN content in one big searchable library.

There’s also an MP3 player function, and the sound surprisingly good even on the little mono speakers on the Nook — but the player itself is pathetically underfeatured.  Anything you put on the Nook is played in alphabetic order by the embedded title tags and that’s it — no picking an album, or even manually organizing your music into separate folders and playing those.  I have a cheap USB stick MP3 player device I got years ago and it can handle rudimentary folder organization better than the Nook.

The experience:  It took me a couple days to really get used to reading on the Nook…but now I enjoy it very much.  True, nothing will replace the look, feel, and smell of a book — paperback or hardbound.  However, I’d not experienced the way an eReader device can disappear with respect to the reading experience.  No matter what I’m reading, what’s in my hands is roughly the same — the page buttons are in the same spots, the display is the same. When I need to put it down, I don’t even need to remember to mark my spot, it just stays there (well, most of the time…again, they’re working on this).

For some reason (probably the cleverness of the e-ink display engineers), the crisp blackness of the text and the not-too-white background are extremely easy on the eyes.  My spouse has had cataract surgery and is plagued by lots of floaters — she hates reading, because of the latter — but reports to me she has no problem with the Nook’s display and finds it quite readable.

So, my grades:

• Aesthetics: A (looks good and feels good in the hands, with or without a protective cover)
• Features: B- (but room for improvement, and the fact they can do so on-the-fly is a big plus)
• Display: A (very easy on the eyes)
• Responsiveness:  B- (still a touch laggy at times and with certain books, but better with the 1.1 software than it was with 1.0)
• Expandability:  A (can add memory and the battery is replaceable; the Kindle doesn’t have either of these features)
• Connectivity:  A- (let me transfer files wirelessly between my PC and the Nook and that minus comes off; let me do it FROM the Nook and it would become an A+)
• Battery Life:  C+ (acceptable, but not spectacular)
• Format Compatibility: A- (add TXT and Word Doc to this and I’d remove that minus)
• Library Organization & Searching: D (BN-purchased content organization gets a B, but anything else I put on there can’t be organized or searched at all, so that part gets a failing grade, alas)
• MP3 Player:  Pass (as in took this pass/fail…and didn’t technically ‘fail’; really needs SOME way of letting people play music in the order they wish, short of manually editing embedded MP3 tags to add ascending numbers as I did)
• Graphics file support:  C+ (JPGs, BMPs, PNGs, and GIFs all display nicely, but there’s nothing resembling any kind of viewer or browser for looking at them — this would be an easily implemented feature, too).
• Product quality in general:  C (again, room for improvement via software update, but the early units were rushed to production and the bugs do show)

Overall assessment:  Would I buy this again or recommend buying it?  Yes.  Would I have opted for one of the other eReaders out there, based on what I know about this one from experience and my prior research on the features, reviews, and capabilities of devices such as the Kindle or Sony’s eReader?  No.  I like the Nook.

Why, despite the flaws I noted above would I have gotten the Nook anyway?  The main reason is because the underlying hardware is solid, in my opinion — it’s the operating system which needs improvement, added features, and bug-fixes, but all of these can be addressed and broadcast to all the Nook owners, whether they got their on December 9th as I did or will be opening theirs in mid February.  Based on the fact there’s already been one such software update, I have faith there will be more and soon.