Nook Color - to get or not to get?

[keithsmith22]

Alright my droidforums.net family. My wife has been wanting an e-reader so I am going to get her one for Christmas. I was wondering if any you have experience with the Nook Color. For the price, this appears to be the best option out. Let me know what you think and if you have real world experience with one. It looks pretty sharp to me but as always I value everyone's opinion. Thanks in advance.

[garrett]

i pre-ordered one for my girlfriend and it came in last week. The thing is awesome its fast and responsive. Obvoisly the reading experience is great but the browsing is really nice. It has the same gallery that is on android phones, i loaded a HD movie on it and it played it without a problem. It came with android 2.1 and is supposed to be getting 2.2 in january. The only thing that caught me off guard is its a little heavier then the previous nook this is mostly due to having a Gorilla Glass screen.(same as the droid) With it being a color the battery life isn't as good as the previous one. Youll get about 8-ish hours of actual usage time on the nook before it needs to be recharged. My girlfriends reads 2 or 3 hours a day and only charges it about once every 3 to 4 days and it has never died on her.

If you have any specific questions or want images of specific functions by all means let me know and ill either answer them or grab some pics for you.

Oh and they almost have it rooted already so thats going to make a good thing even better.

[Eddog4DROID]

IF your wife REALLY REALLY REALLY cares about reading. Get the Kindle. I just bought one last week for my wife and she LOVES it. LOVES it! I had planned on doing this all year. Once I heard about the Nook Color, I almost gave in to that until I realized it does nothing GREAT, just alot of things good. e-ink is so much better than an LCD. And Battery Life on the Kindle is weeks! not hours!

The Nook Color interested me because of Android. If it wasn't for that, I'd be like, meh. I'd rather spend more and get a better tablet like the Samsung (if the price drops!) or another one of the 20 Android tablets forth coming.

[keithsmith22]

I have been reading a ton of reviews and most have been positive but you just never know. I wanted to get some real user reviews. I have thought about the kindle but the Magazines and color aspect really get me. She loves to read magazines to as well as would probably use it in the kitchen when she downloads cookbooks. I was going to make her a Stainless Steel Stand etched with her name on it. Plus the other "tablet" features seem cool. The Kindle does seem good to though. Do the non-color graphics not seem weird or cheesy? Thanks guys for your answers. This is helping me a lot.

[Eddog4DROID]

Well, for Magazines or Cookbooks, etc... if she only likes to read the occasional novel--the Nook color might not be a bad idea then. In Black and White, pictures on the Kindle are not nearly as bad as you would think... for example I tested out a Magazine with pictures... the text is great--the pictures are very clear--they are just black and white. If pictures are supplemental to the experience, go with the Kindle (and it's way cheaper for the Wi-Fi only version! $139 vs $250) But if Pictures are very important (a cookbook, for example) I'd say it is hard to argue against the Nook Color. However, I have never seen one so I can't say.

If Novels are #1 priority. Don't even think about it--the Kindle it is. People usually glance at magazines even if they are regular readers. Novels are read for hours on end.

[sigma1990]

Okay, I will give my experience with other items in the category to help you decide as well as my experience with the NookColor since launch day. First overall it's Great, and a little rough around the edges.

I first purchased two Ipads, gave the wife one and kept one, Jailbroke it, loaded it with kindle/nook/ibooks, and a ton of apps and such. But I also have an Archos 5 Android, Droid X, Nokia Booklet and Toshiba NB305. So with that said the Ipad was a great internet tablet and Ereader, so I decided to sell it while I could still get premium "I paid $450 plus tax and got $450 back) so used it for a few months for the tax... call it a rental fee.

So once I sold I I still needed an Ereader for textbooks and school so in came the Kindle 3, loved the style but "Once you go color" it's hard to go back. So as long as you/your wife has no issue with LCD for 203 hrs. of viewing then color is appreciated.

So I sell the Kindle for $110 purchased for $100 off Craigslist. Found a great deal on the Velocity Cruz Tablet for $209 from Sears, as oppose to the $299 so figured let's try this should be decent for my usage? WOW BAD IDEA, no market and can't even side load many apps., most failed to install.

So, I load market4archos on my Archos 5 and download kindle app and I'm back in business. Returned the Cruz and picked up the Hauwei S7 from Bestbuy. $299!!! LOVED, LOVED, LOVED it... but the battery life was too short and the resistive screen is not as good as the one on the Archos. The
S7 has market, takes most apps, has a snap dragon processor, i picked up a prepaid sim for T-Mobile and since this is a phone, it picked up and allowed me to do prepaid web2go internet, $1.49 a day. So on t-mobile the internet on prepaid phones is 1.49 for a 24 hr usage!!! I got a cheap 15 prepaid phone, activated it put the sim in the S7 and went right to web2go, go on line and everything worked over Edge!!!! In the end the battery life and screen 800*480 resistive, are its ONLY issues.

So by this time the NookColor is coming out so I figured lets try this, I figured it would do what the Ipad was doing and the size should work well, since that's the thing I loved about the Kindle. The NookColor has a screen as good as the Ipad, is just as good of a color Ereader, and the web experience was great, the music, from microSD, Pandora and video playback from my media card worked great. Youtube was decent from the mobile m.youtube site. So I was beginning to feel like, WOW i'm a root away from just was I'm looking for. It's slightly wider than the Galaxy Tab which i considered and played with but not for it's current price. NookColor was an app store of Root away from perfection.

Now the negatives! Day 1 It froze on me so I had to reboot I figured I'm over working the little guy then later in the day I had a Typical Android force close. Day 2 it completely locked up, screen would not respond, I shut it down and turned back on 3 times it would start up right back into that frozen state, I left the house and went to dinner with the wife came back, she picked up her Ipad, i picked up the Nook and it was HOT and still frozen, i turned it off again and back on, this time after a longer than usual boot time it worked but the battery was almost fully discharged? I have no idea what it was doing when it was frozen but it ate the battery up. So I surfed a few site and plugged it in, and went to my other gadgets for the night. Day three I'm considering if I should return it, exchange it for a new one on what.
Overall, it's a great piece of hardware but I'm a little nervous. I have the Bestbuy blacktie protection so worst case I play with it and return or it breaks and get my $30 worth, which I WILL use at some point nomatter what :-). I can say that I really want this thin to be the winner it seems like, and I've gone thru enough to know what a bad product looks like and this is not it, yet there is a but..... I would get it again for myself but would I get it for the wife?? That depends, my wife like stuff that just works? Thus I held off and got her the Ipad after I knew it had been Jailbroken and I could set it up for her had it over and never have to here from her again about it. She carries a blackberry tour, because it works, and hates all my netbooks because of there "issues" so carries an HP business class notebook. She hated the kindles screen, again it's hard to go back to black and white after color, but I think there will be some growing pains like the iphone or ipod touch when they first arrived without the app store.

It's a phone ride for a techie like myself, but I simply say know what your wife wants and make sure it's a simple ereader for now, with some internet browsing and she is good. The potential is FABULOUS it seems.

I have been reading a ton of reviews and most have been positive but you just never know. I wanted to get some real user reviews. I have thought about the kindle but the Magazines and color aspect really get me. She loves to read magazines to as well as would probably use it in the kitchen when she downloads cookbooks. I was going to make her a Stainless Steel Stand etched with her name on it. Plus the other "tablet" features seem cool. The Kindle does seem good to though. Do the non-color graphics not seem weird or cheesy? Thanks guys for your answers. This is helping me a lot.

[tp7six]

Thread Moved to Off Topic Forum

[Eddog4DROID]

Well... technically, Nook Color is an Android device.

[GolfProRM]

I was able to get one of these this past weekend. I absolutely love the device itself. It's built very solidly, and the screen is gorgeous. I find it very easy to read on it, and love that just about everything on the book interface is customizable (background color, word spacing, size, font, etc). I think it'll definitely be a great book reader.

That said, it does definitely have its quirks. I wish you could put sideloaded items on the main home-screens. I also hope they'll add search functionality to PDF files as well. There are also times that the device acts sluggish, but I figure that when they upgrade it to 2.2, that will go away.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the device as-is. I'm curious to where they'll go with their "App Store" next year, and I'm hoping they'll add sideloading of apps, or someone will hack it to do-so. Once it gets Touiteur, I'll never put it down.

[monsterpt]

Just to put my observations out there. I just bought 3 of these for about the same price as a loaded ipad and could not be happier (other than having to use adb to root/sideload apps). I am in full bore tweak mode with mine and the kids will get theirs on xmas. We will probably get one for gramps too since we all swap books constantly but we live 6 hours away and now can share. I am interested to see where B&N goes with updates and how much of the os they begin to let show through on the stock NC.

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