Nook vs. Kindle

After reading all the reviews and tinkering with both of the major e-readers on the market, I have come to a decision in my e-reader purchase.  At the end of this post, I’ll reveal the choice I’ve made but I shall continue to share ideas, thoughts, and news about e-readers.  The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have summed up the long and short of this debate for me:

New York Times E-reader Report by David Pogue

Wall Street Journal E-reader Report by Walter Mossberg

Excerpt form Mossberg WSJ-

Amazon’s Kindle has been the king of the nascent, much-hyped, category of wireless e-readers since it came out in 2007. Now, numerous companies are determined to challenge the Kindle with dedicated, mass-market gadgets for reading digital books and periodicals. The latest, and potentially most important, of these is a contender called the Nook, produced by the giant bookstore chain Barnes & Noble Inc., which started shipping it this week.
The two devices look very similar, but have key differences in capabilities, user interface and polish. Overall, after testing the Nook for about a week, I don’t think it’s as good as the Kindle, at least not yet. At launch, the Nook has the feel of a product with great potential that was rushed to market before it was fully ready.

WSJ Personal Technology Columnist Walt Mossberg gives a hands-on review of the new Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader. He says the Nook, a direct competitor to Amazon’s Kindle, comes up short.

Like the latest standard-size Kindle, which came out earlier this year, the Nook is a roughly 8-inch by 5-inch, ivory-colored plastic tablet that costs $259 and connects wirelessly to an online store. The two devices have essentially identical reading screens, 6 inches when measured diagonally, that allow for only monochrome text and gray-scale graphics, not color. Both come with two gigabytes of internal memory, enough to hold about 1,500 digital books.
Nook’s most obvious difference from Kindle is that it also boasts a second, smaller color screen beneath the main reading screen. This touch screen is used for navigating and for typing via an on-screen keyboard when performing searches or adding notes to books. Also, when the touch screen is dark, it can be swiped to turn pages instead of using the physical page-turning buttons at the sides of the main screen.
The competing Kindle (formerly called the Kindle 2, but now back to just Kindle) uses a joystick, Menu and Home buttons, and pop-up menus on the main screen for navigating. It has a physical keyboard below the screen for typing and can turn pages only using physical buttons.
Also, unlike the Kindle, the Nook lets you lend certain digital books to others for a limited period, an innovation that removes one of the most common complaints about buying books electronically instead of on paper.

My conclusion is this-

Jeff Bezos can relax.  Nook is no competition.  Definitely not yet, at least.  I spent an hour with the Nook and my local Barnes & Noble manager who had just as much trouble as I did, with his new demonstration Nook for customers to look at.

I hereby reverse my previous statement that the Nook pros outweigh the cons with these:

1.
it’s slow.  Much slower than the Kindle. So slow that you don’t know if it is working after you hit a command button, so you keep doing it and this messes it up.

2.
it’s cumbersome.  Very difficult to figure how to do common things like – find the list of newspapers to download.

3.
it’s a little deceptive in that the color touch screen is not really that, so you cannot navigate like you can on an IPhone.

4.
It does not feel as “nice” as a Kindle.  It seems more “clunky” (though nothing like as clunky as Sony’s EReader).

Bottom line – as they have identical prices, get a Kindle.  Nook is not ready for market yet.

I’ll be back soon with an update on my purchase soon,

Geoff Hasler