Tag Archives: barnes & noble

Nook HD: Built for Sluggish Annoyance

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47:366(Y2) - HungeringI really would like Apple to come out with a iPad Mini with Retina display. I’m quite tired of this Nook HD. It’s not very user-friendly and definitely not me-friendly. I don’t want to take a hammer to the device but when I use it, I sort of do.

So I was online to a site that lets you browse various fan-written fiction stories and they have a feature where you can download epub files, so I did so and saved it to my Dropbox. Then I went into Dropbox app on my Nook HD and went to go look for it. The Wifi on the Nook HD is a flaky pile of junk so that took way longer than it should have. Once I found the file I wanted I downloaded it to my Nook because the only other way to get it in there is to pop the MicroSD card, root around for a universal adapter and then put it in that way. That’s annoying, I’d much rather just be able to tap and download, like I would with an iPad Mini.

I downloaded it from my Dropbox and it ended up somewhere in my Nook’s own storage, which I hate to use, I much prefer my MicroSD plugged into the Nook instead, but there is no way to tell it where you want it to store the files. So I had to find another app called OpenExplorer which has an awful interface but lets you move files around the Nook.

Then the Nook library was confused about where I put that file. Every time I went to go look for it and tap on what it found, I’d be sent to the Wifi activation screen, where I would turn it on (why?) and then nothing. Nothing more than that. When I went back to the search and tapped on my file, it told me “File is not present.” and that was that.

I’ve never been happy with the Nook HD user interface. I bought it because it was cheap and supported Barnes & Nobles but really I think I would have been better off getting an iPad Mini. I regret this Nook HD. It could be so much better if only the B&N User Interface wasn’t so fascist. That’s what it really is. B&N doesn’t trust anyone with anything so they make it impossible to use beyond the B&N Book Experience. I don’t want all my ebooks at B&N, I’ve got thousands of ePub files all on my own – could I upload them and locker them at B&N? Of course not. That’s what the MicroSD card is for. So what value does the B&N store have for me? Little.

So is there any way I could get ePubs from Project Guternberg? Nope. I have to find some other way to get them, like on my iPad and then use Dropbox and OpenExplorer to… it’s way too much work. I’m tired even thinking about it.

So, if and when Apple decides to sell a iPad Mini Retina I’ll put all my Nook stuff on eBay and save up for the iPad Mini Retina. At least iOS respects me and I don’t feel like a criminal trying to cajole Android to give an inch.

I still don’t know why people think Android is any good. Wretched system.

photo by: Nomadic Lass

Barnes & Noble's Nook HD+ Is Clever

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Barnes & Noble just sent an email out announcing their two new tablets: The Nook HD and Nook HD+.

Previously to this release I was discussing with my partner, who works for Barnes & Noble ways that B&N could compete with Amazon and Apple in the tablet space. There was a concern that B&N had lost traction and that the company was going to spiral out of control and crash, eventually. These tablets have just eliminated a good portion of that worry.

For full disclosure, I came across a rather pleasant and unexpected windfall in regards to money and I’ve been kvetching about the poor performance of my 1st edition iPad and in a way, Apple has sent a clear message that they regard the device as dead because they are no longer writing software updates for it. I went ahead and purchased an iPad 3 and I’ve been enjoying it quite a lot.

This news from B&N is very interesting to me as this new device has several key areas that put up more bang-for-less-money. The first surprise is the processing speed of the Nook HD+ in comparison with the iPad 3. 1.5GHz dual-core versus 1GHz dual-core. Ever since 2003 when the world pretty much stopped worrying and loved the bomb that is processor speed ratings this distinction isn’t as compelling as it appears on paper. The two units have different core technologies, the iPad has an A5X processor and the Nook HD+ has an OMAP 4470 processor. We have seen from manufacturers like HTC and Samsung that even when you pour huge muscular processors into devices to compete, that if the experience of the user isn’t done correctly then all the computing horsepower in the world means very little. It’s not about the muscles, it’s about the refinement of the motor cortex. It isn’t how strong you are, it’s your dexterity – at least in the phone and tablet space. I do hand it to B&N when it comes to pumping numbers and keeping costs suppressed – that’s a win in their column.

The second surprise, and I’ve been half expecting someone to notice this glaring deficit in tablet OS design comes down to what I believe to be Barnes & Noble’s knife-held-confidently-behind-its-back killer feature. Barnes & Noble is going to bring profile control to the tablet space. This casts a huge pall over both Amazon and Apple devices and redefines a tablet to be a multiuser device. It is exceptionally clever for Barnes & Noble to do this because it draws a clear bead of connection from everyone’s computer experience (where you have an account and profile) off to your device. When it comes to Apple, they rejected this model and regard a device to be a one-person-only deal, which has been a weakness in the iOS OS design. Apple may be too far along to make such a fundamental change to iOS so we may see the creation of a new track of tablet technology. Is a tablet multiuser or single-user? By being multi-user, and if B&N does it elegantly, it can cast B&N in a family friendly light, more than an Amazon or Apple product because one relatively inexpensive device can serve an entire family. Instead of the onerous cost of a Kindle or iPad for each person, because each device is single-user, one Nook HD+ can be used by different members of a family without having to worry about security, privacy, preference or profile leakages between people. It’s a failure of the Apple iOS OS and here is why: When I come across another persons iOS device, I am utterly lost – I don’t know their preferences, their security settings, where they have placed icons, and I find myself having to relegate to the search screen to even find where they put the ubiquitous “Settings” icon. If B&N does profiles elegantly, this will be a non-issue. Rendered moot because each person has their own settings that they are used to, making the confusion evaporate.

I think that B&N will pursue a marketing strategy that elevates the personal touch and the family friendliness of their Nook HD and Nook HD+ devices. That will be key, with profiles, the ability to use LendMe to share books, and their admittedly well-done “Parent recording storybooks for their children” technology they will position themselves to be “The Booksellers who care about you and your family” and they will occupy a third niche in this space. The first niche is the deep-discount one, that’s occupied by Amazon. The second niche is the elegance-at-all-costs one, which is occupied by Apple – and then last but certainly not least, the third niche which is the Friends-Family-Kids one, which is going to be Barnes & Noble Booksellers.

This niche may be the best hope for Barnes & Noble to retain their 21st century relevance.  They should maintain their “Brick and Mortar” presence and cater their stores to being a place where you feel welcome, with friendly staff and a coffeehouse/library atmosphere. The elevator sales-pitch is that B&N is more personable and immediate than Amazon could ever hope of being – you don’t know Jack at Amazon, but you know Jack at B&N. B&N’s approach to kids and family with their very deep roots set throughout America means they have already beat Apple to the market in terms of the personal touch. Yes, Apple has the Genius Bar and yes they are friendly geeks, but you don’t go to a Genius Bar to find out about Apps and Woodworking! You can only do that at a Barnes & Noble!

The real competition isn’t between B&N and Apple anyhow, since Apple touches B&N only in this one market-space. The real competition here is between Amazon and B&N. It’ll be an interesting evolution to say the least – which do people prefer more? The cold, impersonal, sterile deep-discount algorithms of Amazon or the instant-gratification, warm, personal, and direct approach of Barnes & Noble Booksellers? It may simply come down to how people refer to these two competitors. You USE Amazon and you VISIT Barnes & Noble Booksellers. That right there is something that Jeff Bezos can never buy himself into, but B&N already exists to cater to. Which do you value, the impersonal or the personal?

Barnes & Noble Booksellers may have just secured their direct relevancy in the market for the next decade with these two new devices. The proof is in the pudding of course, these devices, once in the stores, will be the final arbiter on the survivability of B&N in the tablet market space.

 

Using the Nook Simple Touch

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Last week I was pretty much 50-50 on whether or not I should get another device, in this particular case, a Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch e-ink Reader. I was hemming and hawing because I already enjoy my iPad so much, I didn’t know if the Nook would be just something to have to have it versus something I’d really use. Thanks to Scott, I got a chance to sit down and really look at a Nook before I had to buy one for myself. Even the test period didn’t really help much, it did shift me 60-40, in favor of the Nook, but I was still quite firmly sitting on that fence.

Later on that week I decided that I was going to get the Nook after all, and to hop off the fence. I did post a question to my blog and social networking groups, but only one or two people commented so that avenue wasn’t as useful as I had hoped. Thanks a a lot people! 😉 So I went to Scott’s store and Scott and I went through the dance, I asked to buy, he gave me his corporate-mandated pitch, and because I’m cheeky, I decided to add a B&N Membership to the entire thing, which did get me $10 off the Nook. Truth to be told, getting the membership (a renewal after it lapsed so long ago) was partly to boost Scott’s membership-card levels and partly for a treat that B&N now has in their cafe, a Key Lime Tart that is probably very bad for me, but tastes oh-so-good. Now I can get a discount on my guilty pleasure and from time to time get a Starbucks drink from people who I trust and who I know LISTEN. So, I got my Nook and we hit the road, heading somewhere in Scott’s new Juke. I sat there pawing at the new device and wanting to set it up. I wondered just how much of a charge might be on the device and if I could indeed set it up while in the car on a road trip. I turned the Personal Hotspot on my iPhone on and started my new Nook. It came with a 69% full battery. More than enough to get it up and running! So I had my Nook set up but no books on it. That came later. By the time I was really starting to explore the Nook we had reached our destination and it was time to put the gadget away.

The Nook is much like the iPad, in so far that Apple and Barnes & Noble both produce a semi-open/semi-locked device. Both devices can accept ePub file formatted e-Books. I copied all the ePub’s that I had over to my Nook and was very self-satisfied that none of them had a problem loading. The Nook doesn’t really have a way to get eBooks onto the device without buying them and pumping them through B&N’s infrastructure, but you can plug the device in and copy over your own ePub files, as many as you like. The Nook does have a little cheekiness to itself as it is. It’s billed as having a respectable storage amount, but you only get 250MB of user-accessible storage. This is kind of a gyp, but the Nook does provide a handy port for MicroSD on the side. After a while I noticed that my eBook collection would be bigger than the standard storage that came with the Nook itself and I (later on) got a 4GB MicroSD card from OfficeMax for just $17. Quite a deal. I set it all up and pushed my big library of ePub books over to the new Nook. It worked like a charm.

As I was browsing through Barnes & Noble’s store I saw a book that caught my eye. It was a Penguin Classic (those “classics” books with the plain covers and cheap prices) and it was Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. The book was very old, published in 1922. I scanned Project Gutenberg, which is a repository for public domain books and everything they have comes in ePub format. I found this book in PG, so I could skip buying it from B&N. No point in wasting money. I downloaded it on my laptop, copied it to my Nook, and I’ve been reading it as the first book on my Nook. I just finished it today and the experience was quite nice. Reading on the Nook is fast, the Nook ST is light as a feather and I really love it’s textured back. You can either tap/swipe the screen or use the dual edge button controls to advance the pages. The display is matte, it’s eInk, so it’s very easy on the eyes, and the fonts and sizes are of course configurable, which I really appreciate. The Nook doesn’t repaint the screen after each page, but only after 5 or 6 of them. This leaves little bits of eInk debris behind, but frankly I didn’t even notice it. The one thing I was bummed about was that I couldn’t find the dictionary feature on the test Nook. Turns out I didn’t read the manual, but once I accidentally tapped-and-held on a word I saw the way of it and that really worked for me. As I said, reading on the Nook is quite pleasurable and reading fast is easier than having to futz around with a physical book. It’s lighter than my iPad and doesn’t have the battery burn that the iPad does.

The Nook is not all rainbows and butterflies however. This past weekend I took my Nook to South Haven’s Beach for some light reading while everyone played around in Lake Michigan. In order to keep my device clean and safe I put it in a ziplock quart-size baggie. This worked well until I got out in to the bright sunshine. As the plastic would touch the screen the Nook would register it as an actual touch, since the Nooks system uses Infrared sensors to register touches on the display surface. I discovered I could avoid all of that by pulling the baggie tight against the Nook device, and that worked acceptably well. Beyond this little oddity, which really isn’t a problem, just something to watch out for and cope with, I am VERY HAPPY with my Nook Simple Touch. For the pricetag, only $139 bucks, you really can’t go wrong! The Nook does need some add-ons, but they aren’t too expensive. The little Nook light is nice to have, as well as that MicroSD card. Add it up and you still come up to about $150-160 bucks. Not bad for being able to haul around 1400 books in my pocket, on demand, able to read anytime and anyplace I like.

The only unanswered question is how will airlines consider the Nook? Even when it’s “Off” it displays an image. Do airlines regard the Nook as a device that needs to be turned off, or a book that doesn’t matter because you can’t turn it off? That’s something that I’ll have to find out once I fly again.

 

Barnes & Noble's Nook Color Review

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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.