Today I got a chance to sit down in private with a Nook Color from Barnes & Noble Booksellers and give it a thorough try. After I’ve used the device for about half an hour, I have many good things and some not-so-good things to say about the device.

The Good

• The device is small, but not too small. It most resembles a paperback book and that’s both a pleasing shape and comfortable in the hands.
• The resolution of the display is sharp and crisp, there was very little eye strain.
• The charger is a standard wall-wart and the plug is a universal mini-flat USB cable. I give B&N mad props for not reinventing some awkward or fragile interface and going with an industry standard.
• Touch sensitivity is a welcome feature from the original Nook device. The entire screen is touch-sensitive and that goes very far in making the device very person friendly
• Buttons are where I expect them and function well, except for one which ends up being in the bad column.
• Apps allowed to work in the background was a nice surprise, also the notification system was pleasant after I noticed how it worked, being in the lower left corner of the display.
• The keyboard click is surprisingly clean and very crisp. That was a very nice surprise and very good feedback.
• You can download ePub books from the Internet. I visited Project Gutenberg and downloaded the Brother’s Grimm Fairy Tales. The device opened the ePub book competently and all the features of reading a book worked as I expected them to.
• Being able to add extended storage via the SD card was a pleasant surprise.

The Bad

• The Volume Buttons on the right side appear to be too close together. This presents a volume control issue. When I pressed the + Volume button the volume went up, but if I pressed it again, the volume went down. I think it’s because the two buttons, for volume up and for volume down are too close together or the rocker has been damaged by too much use.
• The keyboard is both too laggy and too sensitive. When I get to entering web addresses I find myself typing in wwww accidentally. Also, related to this problem is the Search bar. When I touch on Search to look for something I notice the Nook volunteers the last searched item, this is fine, but when I go to tap on the X on the right to clear the field, the keyboard expands and pushes the X up and out of the way. Unless you are very watchful and expect this keyboard behavior, you end up searching for whatever was searched before over and over again, or at least until you master the knack.
• While playing Pandora in the background I couldn’t help but notice that whenever I did something that taxed the processor, the music would stutter. Perhaps Pandora needs a bigger cache, perhaps there is something else afoot. It wasn’t an awful flaw, but it was noticeable.
• The lack of Bluetooth Technology precludes wireless keyboards which would render the Nook Color a poor blogging tool.
• Despite the device being run by an Android Operating System it cannot run Android Apps. It will only use Barnes & Noble’s App Store and not the Android Marketplace. This fragmentation may prove to be an Achilles Heel for this class of device and most certainly will detract from someone comparing the Nook Color to an iPad.
• The device comes with 8GB of storage, 3 of those are reserved for Android itself, so that leaves the user with 5GB of storage. This pales in comparison with the 16GB iPad, and doesn’t even show up on the field when compared to the 32GB or 64GB model of iPad, however, the presence of the SD cards does mitigate this failure somewhat
• The Nook series of readers can only consume content from the Nook store, there is no way to get iBooks or Kindle content on a Nook.

The Ugly

• The device is HEAVY. It’s about as heavy as my iPad, or at least it feels like it is. It’s surprisingly heavy for it’s size and I did have a little trouble holding it like I would a paperback book, in the way it’s design most clearly points that it should be held. It wasn’t enough to upset me, but it was enough to comment on.
• The built-in speaker system is rather tinny and dinky. I suppose if I tried it with headphones the audio experience would have come out better. There is a part of me that really likes to listen to classical music as I read on a device. This was minimally acceptable.
• The way the Nook Color scrolls with a touch is disconcerting at first, there is almost no scroll inertia and when you scroll quickly the display stutters and you get the sensation that you’ve missed something in the list as it has gone by. After a while of use you get used to this little idiosyncrasy and it wasn’t a show-stopper.
• While the Nook Color can download and display ePub book files, I didn’t find a way to move those books into the Books section of the Nook. For these files you are relegated to mucking about in the file system explorer in the Nook to get your books and it does shatter the “All My Books In One Place” theme. I would be far happier if the ePub books that I downloaded off of the Web were immediately shunted off the File System itself and off to the Books function where I could see everything I have in one convenient place.

Final Verdict

The Nook Color is certainly a capable and useful device now that it has a more complete and up-to-date Operating System. The ability to access email, calendars, iCal, Exchange, and use of ePub books are all quite nice to see. I assume that if you copied MP3 files over the Nook Color could be an acceptable music player as well. What it really comes down to here is price. The Nook Color retails at $249.00, and with an Employee discount it hovers around $200 flat. This is in comparison to it’s nearest rival, the Apple iPad which hails at $499.00 for the base model. For half the price of an iPad you can get yourself a very good tablet that can do a majority of the things most people would do with tablets. If you are looking for a “Desktop Replacement Tablet” you won’t find that with the B&N Nook Color, for that you’d be better off going with the Apple iPad. For avid readers who aren’t interested in the Apple App Store or doing Desktop tasks with your device, the Barnes & Noble Nook Color is a fantastic device.