As discussed the other day, the Barnes & Noble nook has received a new software update via some sort of fantastical voodoo otherwise known as wifi. I’ve had a couple of days to play with the new features. Let’s make some arbitrary observations on how good or bad they are.

Speed Increase

One of the first things you’ll notice with the new update is that pretty much everything across the board is a little snappier, from the UI to page turns.

The touch screen now seems more responsive to input. In the past, for example, scrolling up and down through the menus could be a bit of a chore. If you wanted to get the bottom of the menu and you flicked to do so, a lot of the time the screen would not register what you wanted to do, scrolling down instead just a couple of menu items and halting in a jarring manner. Now everything is tighter, with one quick flick getting you were you want to go.

Opening books and page turns have been improved as well. Opening new books has received a slight increase on the Percept-o-meter; the “Opening your book” dialogue that shows up goes away in a timely manner. Simply turning pages feels much better. As soon as you click something is happening. That something usually is page turn. Before, on some books, turning a page could take a couple of seconds sometimes, usually when the next page was an illustration or a new chapter. As of now those things have disappeared, and that is nice.

Also, since I have nowhere else to put this bit of info, when looking up words in the dictionary, you now have the option to type in the word instead of scrolling. This greatly speeds up looking for words.

Games

With the update has come new software. The first we’ll talk about are the games. Only two – Sudoku and Chess – show up with the update but there are quite a few more that I can think of that’d work; pretty much any “simple” board game. Othello, Checkers, Go. Any of those could work.

I had my doubts when I heard that these games would appear. E-Ink is not famed for quick enough refresh rates to accommodate “fast” things. For whatever reason my mind lingered on the Kindle with its one screen. I felt like playing anything on it would be an absolute chore. It turns out the nook has two screens, a fact I might have noticed after two months.

The games actually work really well. The E-Ink display shows the entire board while the touch screen shows roughly a third of it. You simply scroll to the square (in Sudoku) or area of board (in Chess), tap it, and input your number or move. It all works much faster than you’d think and is a nice diversion for when you don’t feel like reading.

Browser

Some other software that was included is a web browser. It’s labeled as being in beta, and it is. Like the games, it uses both screens to view the content and that helps it from not sucking like it would with a one screen only option.

The bottom screen also allows pages to be viewed in color, so you can actually view pictures, at least portions of them. Additionally, you can scroll with either the touch screen or the hard buttons. The left hand buttons go up and down the page and the right side moves the page left and right. It all works pretty well.

It all works well, it is true, but is it worth it to use it? Realistically only in a pinch. If you have a modern cell phone, the browsing on it will be better. It just will be. Additionally, you can probably browse anywhere. The nook can only browse when you’re connected to wifi, which I’m sure is a trade off of never having to pay for the 3G service. The keyboard on your phone will undoubtedly be faster to type on, as well.

With all of that said, though, most mobile pages render pretty well on the device and you’ll see them on a larger screen than that of a cell phone, which is kind of fun. It feels like you just won’t find too many instances where you will really use the browser, given all the limitations.

In Store Browsing

The last big, and arguably most important, feature that B&N has included with the update is the ability to go to a brick and mortar B&N and read nearly any ebook while within their walls for up to an hour. Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to try this feature out, so there’s not a lot that I can write. It is, however, a really interesting idea that gives nook a leg up on its direct competitors. It’s something they will assuredly promote.

Wrap Up

I was fortunate to get my nook right before they released their second big update. I only had to use the original software for a short period of time; I didn’t get to become familiar with any of its idiosyncrasies. Then 1.2 came and for all intents and purposes fixed a lot of the problems people complained about. 1.3, with its speed increases and extra features, should make much of the complaints disappear. It’s not perfect, but nothing is, and if B&N can continue to roll out updates like this I will still continue to really like my nook.

It may come as no surprise that we (read: I) are excited for the newest version of nook software to roll out. I have had mine for around two months and really enjoy it. Today, Barnes & Noble released version 1.3 for its little e-reader that could. Let’s see what they’ve done.

According to the B & N eReader blog, 1.3 brings a few interesting features. Take note, though, that this update (it’s around 64mb) will not be pushed over 3G; you will have to either side-mount the update or download it over wifi.

1. Better wifi connectivity – Your nook should now be able to sniff out more signals.
2. A WEB BROWSER – It’s listed as being in beta right now, and as of this writing I have not seen it in action, but it’s a very interesting addition that is surely pointed directly at the competition. You will need to be connected to wifi in order to surf, however.
3. Games – Now featured are both Sudoku and Chess. I don’t know, personally, how much use I will get from these but I loves me some Sudoku so BRING IT ON.
4. Faster Page Turns – Self explanatory, but they also list quicker times for opening books as well.
5. Read Full Books in Stores – You can now go to any B&N brick & mortar store and read complete ebooks for free for up to an hour. They are also going to be rolling out periodicals soon as well.

That’s pretty much the rundown. My nook is currently updating as we speak (we’re not speaking right now, in all honesty). We’ll have an update on how great 1.3 is soon. I say “great” only in that mine just restarted and the bottom menu has changed for the awesome.

You can download the update here.

I might have lied the other day when I said I’d had the last word on the nook. There’s no last word, people; none. This weekend Barnes & Noble pushed out an update for our little book reader: software version 1.2.

Gizmodo has the full scoop on what was updated, but here are is the nitty gritty on what has changed:

• Enhanced in-store seamless connectivity to enjoy free Wi-Fi, with More In Store content promotions exclusively for Nook owners
• Improved opening of eBooks and ePeriodicals
• Improved response to Reading Now and Settings buttons
• Current reading page and bookmarks on all eBooks are properly saved when you power your Nook off
• Eligible LendMe eBooks in your library have LendMe flags
• Easier navigation of daily subscriptions with issues rolled into one folder
• Improved “back” button functionality for navigating eBooks and ePeriodicals
• Personal files downloaded and displayed in My Documents can be sorted by author and title
• Overall system improvements and battery optimization.

Personally, I have noticed that the battery seems to be keeping up a little better. I’ve also noticed that the “Formatting…” window that shows up when opening books is now labeled as “Opening Book…” The bookmarks have changed to show the page number they were saved on. I have also seen improved performance in connecting to my wireless network.

The biggest visual change is in the touchscreen icons. They now are “shiny” instead of flat colors like they were originally. It took me a day or so to really get to like them, but now I think they’re fine. Take a look:

Old

New

(Sorry, they don’t have many photos of the new menu yet, so it’s rather pixelated.)

So there you have it, really. I am really glad that B&N are taking to heart suggestions and needed changes and putting out updates for them. I can only see the device getting better as we go.

So it has been one full week with my nook, and how does it stack up? Are books in paper form dead? Well, I don’t think so, but we’re getting to the point where they’re becoming less…necessary.

First, let’s begin with some product design. As reported earlier this week, I received the nook – the name is not capitalized – as a gift for Christmas. Barnes & Noble did not account for the demand of their new product, and as such I was stuck high and dry for two months waiting on mine to arrive. (Through various sources – i.e. someone who bought one this week – they are now shipping at an expedient rate.) The device comes in interesting packaging, housed in a thick, clear plastic container that displays the nook like it was an artifact dug from Tutankhamun’s tomb (I’m sure Howard Carter would have loved to find this thing in there; Lord Carnarvan, not so much). Once inside, the nook comes out with some effort, and you will find a USB cable that can be used to plug it into your PC or to the included wall charger. The unit also has a headphone port for listening to MP3′s/audiobooks/whatever and a pair of speakers on the bottom. I have yet to play any audio through the speakers, so I cannot attest to how good they are. But enough of all of the stuff that was covered in the video, how does it feel?

Two Screens

The nook itself weighs but 12.1 ounces (according to its website) and feels essentially like holding any standard sized novel in terms of weight. On either side of the unit are two buttons to page back and forth, as you’d assume (Protip: you can also turn pages with finger swipes on the touchscreen). The bottom fourth or so, however, is made up of a touch screen that is used for selecting and options. All input to the device outside of the page turning is done through the touch screen. The thing that one might notice is that at first the screen feels like it is not going at the clip you might want. After several days of using it, I have determined that it comes down to two things: the nature of e-ink displays and most of us having used “quicker” touch-screens in other devices. What we have to get over at first is the refresh rate of the e-ink display. When you turn the page, the device “rewrites” the content on the screen and then ostensibly shuts down. What is great about the technology is that once something is displayed on the screen, it needs no further power to display it, it’s printed there until the next instance that you turn a page or view a menu. What’s not as great about the technology is that this page turning takes a split second to occur; the device cannot change one little area of the screen, it has to cycle the entire screen to display new content. How this comes back to the touchscreen is that if you are trying to go down a menu list by pushing the arrows on the screen, the whole process might seem slow due to the refresh rate. I find that it is not the processor inside that is slow, it’s simply the way the technology works. For example, you want to select something on a menu that is five items down, you can press the down arrow five times, waiting each time to see it select each item as it goes, or you simply press the arrow five times in rapid succession and the screen refreshes once and gets to the item you want. The guts inside know what you want, the screen just has to catch up. I believe that may be where some of the remarks of it being “sluggish” have arisen; it’s just the way the technology is.

On the other item, the “quicker touch-screen devices”: I own an iPhone, many hundreds of thousands of people do too and have become accustomed to that sense of extremely quick screen movement and response from the screen. While the touchscreen on the nook does a very admirable job of going through menus efficiently, there is a subtle lag if you are assuming it will be as quick as that of an iPhone. You have to be slightly more deliberate in your presses. The nook’s touchscreen definitely uses a similar but not as sophisticated screen. If you take the iPhone out of the equation, it works just fine. There is an onscreen keyboard for typing in queries, and it, of course, doesn’t work as flawlessly as the iPhone, but after using it a bit this week I can say that it works well, so long as you keep in mind that the guts of the machine is keeping up with you and you just need to wait on the screen to refresh.

Buy It Up

Purchasing novels on the device is simple enough. You’ll have to create a Barnes & Noble account, but once you do everything runs smoothly enough. When I heard that mine had shipped, I made an account online and put some ebooks in a wishlist so that I could remember them. Turning on the device for the first time, I was asked to input my B&N account info, and once the product was synced to my account, it auto downloaded that wish list and I had purchased my first novel in a matter of minutes. Like the Kindle, who we had advertised on this very page for some time, the nook uses 3G cellphone magic to connect to the B&N store from anywhere in addition to WiFi; you should hardly ever be in a position where you can’t search and download new books. To save on battery life, the 3G does not seem to be on at all times, it kicks on when needed. When going to the shop, it may take a few seconds as it re-establishes a connection, but it hasn’t been too bad in the time that I’ve experimented with it. I’m eager to see how it’ll fair in other places than where I currently live, though.

Like other ebook readers, you have the ability to access some newspapers and magazines too; at this time I unfortunately haven’t had the chance to try those out, so I will not speak of them in this review. Conceivably, on the “home” screen for the device, if one goes to the “Daily” section, all of these publications would automagically be located there for your consumption. One interesting feature of the “Daily” section is the inclusion of a couple of B&N blogs that show up every couple of days. There are two by default, it seems, one by a fellow names Teddy Wayne who writes a subsection of barnesandnoblereview.com called Grin & Tonic, and the other by a little known author named Stephen King, who writes for Today in Literature. King’s posts are somewhat self explanatory considering the site he’s writing for. I am not sure how these two have made their way onto the device (other than one working for B&N and the other is holy-shit Stephen King), but I really would like to be able add more blog-esque daily updates like these. They’re both generally interesting to read and a great diversion from reading just books.

Expandability

Unlike the Kindle, nook offers you the ability to add storage the device. The back cover comes off and you can add a microSD card if you happen to use up the 2GB of onboard storage. Additionally, if think your battery is dumb and you want another, you can replace it yourself. Shazaam!

Something Wrong?

Every ray of sunshine does cast a shadow, however, and the nook is not without its faults. I haven’t found a whole lot to be negative about the device but two things do stand out. The first is battery life. The official website says this:

Read for days. You can read for up to ten days without recharging with wireless off.

I don’t know if that’s wholly true; in fact I’m pretty sure it’s not. Currently I’ve nearly read one full book and as I type this I am putting the device on the charger for the third time this week (that’s including the initial charge after opening the box, so really it’s the second time). I’m pretty sure it’s not the e-ink display (which looks fantastic, by the way, I haven’t even mentioned that yet) that’s rocking the battery, but the bright, colorful touchscreen. It’s a blessing and a curse; you want the cool touchscreen, but the batteries do drain quicker because of it. Am I let down that it’s not “ten days?” A little, but in terms of the main things I recharge in a week, my laptop gets 2 hours (or less) and my iPhone gets one full day before desperately needing a charge. My nook is king of things that don’t need charging in my house. Granted, I have been using it a TON this week since it’s all new and shiny, so that may have something to do with it, but what I am seeing is still less than half of what is advertised.

The only other issue I’ve come across is that on a couple of occasions on this first novel that I’ve purchased, leaving the novel and coming back has a couple of times forgotten where I had left off. Once, for example, while I was on page 150 or so, I left to go do something else on the device and came back to it being on page 88. The device allows you to set plenty of bookmarks, and every time I have done that and left nothing poor has occurred, but I think they need to probably just transform and roll out with an update. I’m sure there’s just a bug in there somewhere. Speaking of page numbers, this first novel (Tokyo Vice for the curious) has odd page numberings, and that may have something to do with the device not always remembering. There are instances I’ve noticed where I will turn the page and the page counter doesn’t go up, but on a second turn it acts correctly and continues on. The content changes, just not the page number. The second book I’ve read into (Freakonomics) hasn’t shown any of this. I’ve read about fifty pages into that and it’s keeping up just fine. It seems to be just a coding error in that one particular book, but I can’t say for sure as I haven’t had extensive time with the device and multiple novels.

Books vs. eBooks

So the big money question right now is: “Do I need one?” This particular query had me stumped for some time. I love reading books; you could go so far as to say I co-host a show about them, so the idea of taking the physical paper out of my hands was something that for the last couple of years during Kindle’s rise I never quite grasped. The new-book smell, the visual cue of your progress, the covers; all of these things I enjoy greatly. I’m proud to say since starting the show in 2007 I’ve read nearly 40 novels, and they all sit on my shelf looking badass. What pushed me over the edge to wanting an ebook reader was not only the fact that I think it’d be cool to talk about them on the show, but that my bookshelves are now full and there’s no more room at the inn. I needed an alternative, and the nook came out of nowhere looking all badass so I had to get it (or receive it as a gift, whichever the case may be).

In the week that I have had the device, I can say that it may not replace the physical book for me (there are just some things I NEED TO HOLD), but it damn well comes close. The screen, which I’ve hardly mentioned, looks great and doesn’t burn out your eyes because it’s not backlit. The nook is about the weight of a general paperback – actually about the weight of Neil Stepheson’s Quicksilver – so holding it is not a pain. In fact, since it’s a solid unit, holding it actually easier than keeping up with, say, Quicksilver, which is 950 pages. I spend most of my time holding my nook in one hand, very casually and it feels great. There’s no fuss with pages flopping down or wind flipping them around. Currently, I’m juggling books on my nook and George R.R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows in hardback, a 750 page-er, and my weak little man arms get tired quickly from holding that tome. The nook is just more convenient.

Will you need a nook? That’s hard to say. Luckily, unlike the Kindle, Barnes & Noble stores have kiosks where you can go and play with the nook at your leisure. Go try it out first, by all means. It may fit with your lifestyle and it may not, but if you’ve gotten this far into this review then I just want you to know that it definitely is a very solid machine.

The Last Bits

Well friend, you and I have gone on a long journey through 2200 words of nook review. It has now come to a close. At the end of the day, I enjoy my nook. It is not without its idiosyncrasies, but if you are in the market for an eBook reader, I can whole heartedly suggest the device. Just make sure you also pick up a case; you don’t want your new toy to get scuffled up.

The nook currently retails for $259. You can find more information on Barnes & Nobles’s website.

I hope to have some more in depth thoughts about it soon, once I’ve had a chance to play with it more. Enjoy!

So not too long ago I may or may not have written a fairly gushing preview of the Barnes & Noble Nook, a portable E-Reader machine that has a color touchscreen that sits along the bottom. I mean, really, it does look sexy. Look at that thing. Who wouldn’t want one? How it could it be anything less than pure awesome? As it gets closer and closer to its debut, review copies have now been sent around, and Engadget has weighed in. Here’s a snippet:

Throughout our testing with the Nook we vacillated between being completely charmed by the aesthetics of the reader, and completely frustrated by the way it actually works.

Oh my. Head over to Engadget for their full review.

Another interesting feature is that if you bring your Nook into a B&N store, you’ll be able to access extra goodies. First there’s free wifi if you need it, but you also get access to B&N’s library while within the store. So just like if you were browsing a novel, flipping pages here and there, you can browse the catalogue from within the store and look through full novels. When you’re not in a B&N store, however, you’re limited to just reading the first chapter of novels.

Also a new idea is the lending feature. If you know of someone who also has a Nook, you can “lend” some novels to them for 14 days. There are a couple of caveats with this feature, however. For one, while the book is lent out, you can’t read it. That logic makes sense, but that might upset some people who cry “well, it’s an ebook, it can exist in two places at once, unlike physical novels!” But those people will just have to make due. Additionally, you can only lend out a novel once. So if you reaaally wanted your thirty year old cousin to read Twilight and he doesn’t finish the first time, that’s it. He either has to buy it or realize he’s a thirty year old man reading Twilight and get over it.

The prices for B&N’s books are roughly the same as Amazon’s. Most new titles go for $9.99, but some snoopers have found that there are quite a few novels going for much more at the B&N store. The average of those higher priced titles generally sits around 20% more, but hopefully we’ll see the cost structure change once the ball gets rolling.

So there’s your preview of Nook (in no relation to a certain Animal Crossing tyrant). I, for one, think it’s a pretty damned sexy device and have hopes of picking one up, but only time will tell how well it does alongside the Kindle. At least we’ll now have some healthy competition.

Here are links to the Specs on the device and Product Comparisons.