In case you didn’t hear, today Barnes & Noble dropped a new firmware for their Android-powered e-Reader, the nook. For those of you not familiar with the nook, it’s an e-book reader similar to the Amazon Kindle, albeit based on our favorite operating system, with a 6″ diagonal e-ink display coupled with a 3.5″ super-wide color lcd display. It’s a very cool take on the e-reader, and has definitely proven more flexible than the Kindle.
Barnes & Noble released firmware 1.3, a major upgrade for the nook today. I got a chance to go hands-on with it, and I have to say I’m impressed. Added in with today’s firmware version 1.3 was a web browser, two games (chess and sudoku), and a feature called read in-store. I used a nook close to its launch and had several gripes. One was the slowness of the e-ink display. The thing was painfully slow to update. Subsequent firmware fixes have obviously sped this up to where it’s almost, just almost smooth. The browser rendered pages very well, though there were two limitations that the e-ink display may never overcome.
The first is AJAX. AJAX (stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML) is the web tech that makes things move on the web without flash. The GMail interface, much of the interface of The Droids (and all of the back-end that we use to write articles), and almost all popup menus these days are powered by AJAX. AJAX has enough problems with touchscreen devices, because AJAX can differentiate between a mouse hovering over an element versus clicking on it. On a touch-screen, you can’t do that. With an e-ink display, it doesn’t refresh unless you scroll, so on the nook, I looked up an Engadget story, and the comments never displayed, because they load using AJAX. So basically, it can’t show dynamic content.
Another problem with the browser is the clunky controls. See the pic on the left to see what I mean. The small color screen shows a full screen version of the website, and when you scroll on the screen, it highlights a box on the e-ink screen to show where you’re looking. It’s not the best way to navigate the web. Also, there’s a certain amount of lag in scrolling on the color screen. Coupled with the more significant lag on the e-ink screen, and it doesn’t make for a very connected web browsing experience. I never knew where to look. Another thing I noticed was that it wasn’t the speediest web browser either. I don’t know if it was because of the e-ink display, or if it delays the color display to sync up to the e-ink display, but it seemed to load pages pretty slowly, considering it was on B&N’s wifi at the time.
I didn’t try the games, but the Read In-Store feature is very nice. You can read any title in the nook store for free, for an hour, as long as you’re in a Barnes and Noble. This makes sense, because you can do this with actual books. But you can’t search within actual books for text, unless it has an index).
The text entry using the on-screen keyboard worked much better than I had anticipated. A small url bar is shown at the bottom of the e-ink screen and it updates as you type on the color screen. It lags, but it’s not crippling, and it’s not even that frustrating. I guess what I’m saying is that it lags in a nice way.
And that’s the crux of the matter. The nook definitely has some shortcomings when it comes to being a web tablet, but certain things about the experience make it almost worthwhile. The e-ink display, while monochrome, is definitely easy on the eyes. Though it can’t provide a rich web browsing experience, I could see using it to read a few bookmarked site that were in a print-friendly format. I the nook needs an RSS feed reader more than a web browser. Just text and the occasional embedded image on that glorious e-ink screen.
As an aside, I have to say what a nice device the nook is to hold in your hand. It’s got a satisfying weight, but isn’t too heavy to hold for a long time, it feels solid, yet the materials feel organic, and the control scheme is dead simple and intuitive (except for the browser experience, which IS marked “beta”, to be fair). The e-ink display refreshes much faster than before, and it the keyboard is pretty useful.
So, with this update, Barnes and Noble has shown they’re committed to updating the nook, adding new features and making improvements. This is good, because version 1.3 of the nook shows some serious promise, and shows just how far Android can take this e-reader. Honestly, it makes me wish I read more.
