helps you find the perfect gadget. ver. 1.2

"It's also worth noting that the Nook's off-white border is closer to gray than to white, and the finish is shiny (we prefer the Kindle's matte finish, but that's a small nitpick)."

"Aesthetically, the Nook is better looking [than the Kindle], less busy, with a more proportionate bezel (and a wee bit more girth). I like the gray rubber backing as much as I loved in on the original Kindle—I still don't know why Amazon abandoned that."

"In all, the look and feel of the Nook is exactly where it needs to be, striking the perfect middle ground between cozy reading partner and lust-worthy gadget. You want to show it off to your friends as much as you want to curl up with it on a rainy day."

"The Barnes & Noble Nook is, in fact, a handsome device, close to the Kindle in size but with far cleaner lines and a less cluttered look."

" It’s also the least posh-feeling e-reader, being unapologetically made of plastic while both the Kindle and the Sony are partially clad in metal. Overall, though, the Nook’s intermediate size feels better in the hands than the Kindle or Sony, and it’s more (coat) pocket-friendly than the Kindle."

" The physical shape of the nook is slightly bowed in cross-section, with the left and right edges being thicker and then tapering in to the center; that adds up to a device that’s arguably easier to hold than the narrower but flat Kindle."

"Its size is akin to a typical trade paperback, measuring 7.7-inches by 4.9-inches, half an inch thick, and weighing in at 11.2 ounces. It's certainly not big or bulky by any measure, but it feels solid and substantial in your hands."

"The second touch display definitely showed fingerprint smudges after a while, but that’s no big deal. In fact, we carried the Nook in a messenger bag that gets thrown into the backseat of a car everyday and it seemed to be fine. However, on one occasion we accidently dropped the Nook from about 4 feet off the ground and it broke the E Ink display."

"The Nook is a bit shorter and narrower than the Kindle, but it is an ounce heavier and significantly thicker."

"[The touchscreen] is exclusively for navigation and controls. Sometimes it makes sense; when you’re viewing inch-tall book covers, for example, you can tap to open one…. Worse, the touch screen is balky and nonresponsive, even for the Nook product manager who demonstrated it for me."

"The color touch screen at the bottom of the device creates an interesting dynamic. For better or worse, since it's bright and vibrant when turned on, it makes the upper e-ink screen appear bland and dull. But the LCD is eye-catching and offers an extra bit of wow factor that's currently not present in the Kindle, or in any other competing e-book reader. "

"If you’re expecting the touchscreen to boast all the transcendent, fluid slickness of an iPhone, you’ll be disappointed. It’s not that gorgeous, and the Nook would have been nearly as pleasing if the screen was monochrome."

"Still, I need to get this out of the way: The second screen is not a sudden and miraculous cure for what ails ebook readers. It may prove to be, but B&N's current implementation is conservative."

"Since a capacitive rather than resistive touchscreen is used, finger-swipes can be light and gentle (though it also means there’s no using a regular stylus, and no ability to add handwritten notes)."

"The color display was reasonably responsive, though we did have some nagging issues with scrolling through lists; we often had trouble getting the screen to recognize downward swipes."

"Unlike the Kindle, the Nook's keyboard is only visible when you need it, and as an iPhone user, I found it natural and accurate. The capacitive touch is a real boon, especially on a screen so small."

"How’s that keyboard? Adequate–which, in the land of the e-reader, counts as a compliment."

"Annotations are handled by the touchscreen; at any point during reading you can choose the “Highlights and Notes” option and pick from “Hide highlights”, “Add highlight and notes” and “View notes for this page”."

"Ease of use is the biggest element in the nook’s favor, with the touchscreen UI perhaps the most intuitive way of navigating the ebook experience that we’ve tried."

"While the Kindle's navigation system isn't exactly world class, it ran circles around the Nook's, despite the great possibilities offered by the latter's use of the touch screen."

"At first, you may find yourself muddling through the interface, stopping to figure out what button to push next to get to where you want to go. But with some practice, it starts to grow on you and we ended up liking it."

"I found the capacitive interface to be handy, but it also revealed the bugginess of the early software. Scrolling could be sticky, tapping the home button or the screen occasionally did nothing, and using the directional pad to navigate text made me yearn for the Kindle's physical mini-joystick."

"Navigating the Nook makes the 1040 tax form seem like a breeze. You’ve got two page-turn buttons (< and >) on each side of the reading screen, up/down/back buttons on the color screen, and a Home button above the color screen. Quick: Which one returns you to the table of contents?"

"Switching between the lower and upper screens is sometimes confusing, and the lower screen's "back" button sometimes takes you all the way back to the top menu, clearing out whatever was on the upper screen."

"Since the nook uses the same sort of E Ink panel as the Kindle – and most other ebook readers on the market – the actual reading experience is pretty familiar. Text is crisp and sharp-edged, with 2-3 font styles and different sizes supported, and since there’s no backlighting it’s an easier read than attempting to do the same with an LCD screen."

"Even though it’s exactly the same E Ink technology that the Kindle and Sony Readers use, the Nook’s screen is achingly slower than the Kindle’s. It takes nearly three seconds to turn a page — three times longer than the Kindle — which is really disruptive if you’re in midsentence."

"The E Ink display does a perfect, though predictable job of generating easy to see and easy to read text and images on the screen. In our tests -- and this may just be due to the Kindle we were using -- we felt it very slightly outperformed Amazon's option in contrast."

"Yes, the touch screen is more responsive than the laggy e-ink screen, and yes, you can flip through your reading collection Cover Flow-style, but you're just not going to get that buttery smoothness you encounter with the iPhone."

"The contrast of the display is on par with rival units from both Amazon and Sony, but the refresh rate is another story. We found the Nook’s refresh rate while updating information on the screen to be the slowest in the group. It’s not like you will be changing pages that often, but when you do, it can be tiring while waiting for the screen to change."

"In its 1.0 implementation, Nook is not as fast or as smooth as it should be, but already it's showing that the second screen is not a gimmick."

"Oddly enough, Barnes & Noble’s e-reader is the only one of the three to have nailed the most basic input action of all: turning pages."

"It's not exactly that fast of a device anywhere, color screen or otherwise, so you have to get used to all kinds of little pauses and punctuation in the experience."

"The Kindle is still a better machine. It’s faster, thinner, lighter and much easier to figure out. Its battery lasts more than three times as long (seven days versus two)."

"According to Barnes & Noble, using the wireless very sparingly can get you 7 to 10 days of battery life without having to recharge, which falls a few days short of the Kindle's best-case-scenario battery life estimates of approximately 14 days."

"E-Ink’s low power consumption lets e-reader makers quote battery life in days, not hours, although the more power-hungry color LCD does have an impact on the Nook: Barnes & Noble says the gadget will go for ten days on a charge, versus two weeks for the Kindle."

"There’s also a user-accessible battery – unlike the Amazon device – though the payoff is a slightly reduced runtime in comparison: up to 10 days with the wireless shut off, B&N say, versus the Kindle’s 14 days."

"It claims about 10 days of typical use with wireless off, and just two days with wireless on. In my week of tests, with wireless on constantly, I had to charge it three times."

"Barnes & Noble claims that you can read the Nook for up to ten days before charging, and these claims are pretty close."

"The Nook charges via the included micro USB cable, and we've yet to perform a battery run-down test. But devices with e-ink displays generally boast long battery life because once a page is drawn, it requires very little, if any, power to maintain. That said, Barnes and Noble executives have admitted that adding a backlit, color mini display and Wi-Fi will likely take a toll on battery life. "

"It’s 0.5-inch thick, which counts as chunky in this comparison."

"The Nook is a bit shorter and narrower than the Kindle, but it is an ounce heavier and significantly thicker."

"Its size is akin to a typical trade paperback, measuring 7.7-inches by 4.9-inches, half an inch thick, and weighing in at 11.2 ounces. It's certainly not big or bulky by any measure, but it feels solid and substantial in your hands."

"We also like that you can import images to be your screensaver. Alas, you can't send images to the device wirelessly; you need to connect the Nook to your Windows or Mac PC via the included Micro-USB connector and then "sideload" them manually. The same is true for MP3 music files that you can load onto the device and listen to while you read."

"Like the Kindle, the Nook has an extremely basic audio player, meant mostly for listening to MP3s as you read, which you can do over headphones or the device’s tinny monophonic speaker. However, it lacks the Kindle’s support for Audible audiobooks–and given that Amazon owns Audible, I wouldn’t bet on the Nook adding that capability anytime soon."

"The music player isn't much yet—and has a few kinks B&N is still working out, like automatically and unpleasantly alphabetizing all your songs—but it's a real applet, unlike the Kindle's."

"Like the Kindle, there’s a limited media-player app on the nook, which will play MP3 files though no other format. Playback control is more straightforward thanks to the touchscreen, though it’s a basic experience, and you’re able to play music in the background while reading, browsing the library or the shop. "

"The Nook also functions as a decent PDF viewer and surprisingly solid music player, though we were bothered by the fact that every time it switches a song, the lower screen lights back up -- that's not good for battery life or for reading."

"We love that the Nook has a built-in speaker and, as expected, it sounds mediocre at best for music playback. We would have preferred it be located on the side rather than the bottom too, but it’s not a big deal. We did notice that the E Ink screen would flash occasionally when you switched songs and that there was an audible pop in a couple of instances too."

"The Nook features 2GB of internal memory, enough for about 1,500 titles. It also has a microSD slot that can dramatically increase your capacity. A 16GB card can hold an additional 17,500 e-books. Although with wireless access to your online library, local storage capacity becomes less important. "

"The device ships with 2GB of storage onboard, and has that microSD slot for expansion up to 16GB (we assume, it's SDHC)."

"Fact is, Amazon’s e-book store is still much better. Of the current 175 New York Times best sellers, 12 of them aren’t available for Kindle; 21 are unavailable for the Nook. Kindle books are less expensive, too…. 74 percent of the time, Amazon offers the lowest-priced e-books (cheaper than B&N or Sony) by an average of 15 percent."

"As you might expect from Barnes & Noble, the Nook's content selection is quite good, and the company is doing everything it can to compete with Amazon (and, to a lesser extent, with Sony) both in terms of pricing (most bestsellers are $9.99) and number of titles, but Amazon arguably has better pricing overall, and slightly better selection."

"Nook claims a catalog of just over one million digital books, versus 389,000 for the Kindle. But this is somewhat misleading, because over half of the Nook catalog is made up of free out-of-copyright titles published before 1923, the vast majority of which are likely to be of little interest to average readers."

"When it comes to shopping for books (and reading them), the Nook is the Kindle's equal, and may soon leverage Barnes & Noble's 800 physical locations to knock it out of first place."

"We also think B&N's store options and book browsing are far better than what Amazon offers. When it comes to looking for a title, being able to actually see the covers of books is a tremendous help (especially if you know what you're looking for)."

"As long as you understand that the Nook’s million titles include lots of public-domain freebies–both classics and forgotten curiosities–the fact that the e-reader offers Google books in such vast quantity is a pro, not a con. As for modern books you’ll pay for, the B&N, Amazon, and Sony stores’ total counts may differ, but the basic situation doesn’t: There’s lots that’s available, and lots that’s missing."

"The Barnes & Noble eBook Store has more than one million titles, a number that includes the 500,000 or so copyright-free books in ePub format available through Google Books. By comparison, The Kindle Store offers about 360,000 books."

"Like the Kindle, the nook isn’t perfect in its roster of file-types: from Barnes & Noble, Fictionwise and eReader you’ll get DRM-laced EPUB, PDB and PDF files, though there’s no support for Amazon’s AMZ format. You can also read non-DRM or Adobe DRM EPUB files, non-DRM PDB and PDF files, though not Microsoft Word DOC files or plain text TXT formats."

"The Nook supports a variety of e-book formats, including FictionWise, PDF, and ePub. Unfortunately, there is no support for DOC or HTML files, which is a serious omission. Support for ePub is particularly notable. While Sony, iRex, and much of the digital publishing world is standardizing on ePub, Amazon has been holding out and sticking to its own proprietary format. The merit of each strategy is debatable, but by supporting ePub the Nook can read more than 500,000 free titles in the Google Books catalog."

"Like Sony's e-book Readers, the Nook is considered a more open device than the Kindle, because it supports the ePub format, which, outside of Amazon, has become the de facto standard for e-books. The Nook also supports the PDB format and has native support for PDF files in both normal and "reflowed" modes. However, it currently can't read Word or text files, which is a bit of a bummer."

"This thing is ripped right out of the Kindle’s master playbook.... Same free cellular connection so that you can download books wherever you happen to be. Same compatibility with iPhone or computer."

"If your files are DRM-free then that makes things easier; you can’t use WiFi to transfer them wirelessly to the nook, but you can side-load them via USB or microSD card, and Barnes & Noble include the necessary USB to microUSB cable in the box."

"You can load the Nook with e-books, PDF files, images and MP3 files via a USB connection simply by dragging and dropping, just as you can with the Kindle."

"Amazon also syncs with the Mac, PC, Kindle and iPhone copies of your books, so you’re always on the page where you stopped, even if you’re on a different gadget. Any notes and highlighting you’ve added to your books also appear magically on your other gadgets. (Barnes & Noble says that these features will arrive [on the Nook] — yes, you guessed it — next year.)"

Barnes & Noble ranked in the top 50 in customer service among all U.S. retailers in the 2005 and 2007 National Retail Federation Foundation survey of consumers.

Barnes & Noble ranked 1st out of 113 companies for their customer experience according to a survey of 4,500 consumers conducted by Forrester Research in April 2009.

"Based on BBB files, Barnes & Noble has a BBB Rating of B- on a scale from A+ to F."

On their website, Barnes & Noble's nook return policy states that: "You can return nook within 14 days of receipt. Either call 1-800-THE-BOOK (843-2665) for a return authorization, or return it to a Barnes & Noble store. A 10% restocking fee will be charged to customers returning a non-defective device that has had its shrink wrap removed and/or seal broken.... If you do not call for a return authorization number and send the nook to the wrong return center, no refund will be provided and your nook will not be returned to you."

On their website, Barnes & Noble's nook warranty policy states that: "Subject to the terms and conditions of this Limited Warranty, Barnes & Noble, Inc. ("B&N") warrants to the original retail purchaser only ("you") that your nook will be free from defects in materials and workmanship under normal consumer use for a period of one (1) year from the date of original retail purchase (the "Warranty Period"). This express warranty is not transferable to subsequent owners of the product. If your nook was originally purchased by someone else as a gift for you, as shown by a gift receipt, you will be considered the "original retail purchaser" of that nook."