Harry McCracken of the Technologizer has a review of the Nook. He feels that it is the Kindle’s most serious rival and the most important ereader to arrive since the first Kindle. This is despite the rough edges he currently sees in the software. If you go to his site you will see a comparison chart of the Nook, Kindle and Sony Touch. One thing all these reviews miss, however, is the fact that the Kindle has a browser that allows the reader to download books from sources other than Amazon. Not so the Nook, where you are locked into B&N for wireless. Here is a short excerpt:
Let’s get one thing out of the way right now: The Nook isn’t a Kindle killer–not in this initial form, at least. For all its pleasing touches, intriguing innovations, and clear advantages over the Kindle, it feels like a less-than-perfectly-polished 1.0 product, just like Amazon’s first e-reader did a couple of years ago. The user interface is surprisingly sluggish, there are some usability gaffes, and I encountered a major bug with the device’s most-touted feature. Even the much-hyped lending feature has a major gotcha: You can lend a book once. Period.
The good news is that these issues all relate to software, not the physical design. Barnes & Noble plans to quickly use the Nook’s auto-updating capability to push out fixes and refinements; given that the device is sold out until early 2010, it’s possible that the Nook that most purchasers get their hands on will be a meaningful improvement on the one I tried. And a slightly more zippy, less quirky Nook could indeed leave the Kindle in a clear second place.
