The Barnes & Noble Nook is the market's first Android-powered ebook reader and, at first glance, brings many key advantages over Amazon's market-defining Kindle. While these extra features do make it an enticing alternative, the device brings along a few kinks that make it far from being a clear-cut choice.
Positives: While it brings the same 6-inch e-ink display as the Kindle, the Nook takes it up a notch by throwing in a small capacitive touchscreen below it. That means, you can thumb through your list of books without having to put up with the slow e-ink screen, whose refresh rates are usually downright frustrating.
Like the Kindle, it comes with free 3G for downloading books. Unlike it, though, it throws in Wi-Fi and microSD card expansion (up to 16GB), giving you more options for getting books (it supports the universal ePub format, PDB and PDF) onto your device. It also comes with 2GB of internal storage, an onboard MP3 player and access to a huge library numbering in the tens of thousands. Not bad, right?
Do you stay away from ebooks because you can't have friends borrow them like print copies? Not so with this ebook reader, which lets you lend your digital books to other Nook owners for up to 14 days (you can't read them while they're on loaner, though). Even better, Barnes & Noble allows you to read the full text of their books for free, provided you're inside one of their stores. Yep, just like the way you can browse real books inside any bookstore.
Negatives: E-ink's problem is it's very slow. That doesn't change here. Flipping from page to page is no different from other e-ink readers. Fortunately, the LCD allows you to navigate your library faster. The tradeoff is it eats up battery in a bad way.
There's also no text-to-speech here, which is disappointing, considering how basic the feature is on a computer (plus, the Kindle has it). Finally, it has some very real software bugs (such as the painfully slow boot-up and grating turtle-speed of opening of a book) that we're hoping Barnes & Noble can fix with an update.
Conclusion: Is the Barnes & Noble Nook better than the Kindle? In terms of core features, it's about the same. The software glitches and the lack of text-to-speech, in fact, make it even less in terms of base performance. With a good price point, ePub support and some unique features, though, it's a solid contender that just might prove to be your cup of tea.
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