11 Dec 2009 mjg59   » (Master)

Nook update

My nook arrived today, along with an email asking for my shipping address in order to be sent a CD with the source on. So that's progress. The nook itself is an interesting device - it comes in impressively well produced packaging, which looks easily as attractive as any Apple product I've laid hands on lately. Except that it then includes a double-sided sheet of instructions in the outer packaging to tell you how to get the damn thing out.

And so far, that seems like a pretty good summary of the device. There's a huge quantity of form here, but the function is lacking. The initial registration was made infuriating by the lag between hitting a key on the keyboard[1] and anything happening. I'm not talking about the understandable lag due to the latency of updates on e-ink screens - I'm talking about the seemingly non-deterministic time between tapping the screen and it indicating that I've pressed a key. The coverflow feature for books is better than selecting from a menu of items (e-ink lends itself badly to interactive displays), but slow and jerky. Worse, it's limited to B&N content. Anything you obtain elsewhere and then copy onto the device (which presents as USB mass storage) ends up in a separate menu without any coverflow. And, even more infuriatingly, you can't catagorise the files you copy on there. It's just one big list, sorted alphabetically by author (surname) and then title.

Once you're in a book, things aren't bad. It reformats the text every time you enter a book (no caching), but that takes much less time than my Sony did. The default font is very readable, even at small sizes. But there's clearly something horribly wrong - various epub files I have take up to 4 seconds to perform a page turn, which is way longer than the second or so my Sony took. There's no way to skip to a given page number, which seems like an insane oversight. And, though it's a minor point, the next/previous page buttons are the opposite way around to the Kindle or Sonys, and it's taking a while to get used to that.

It's a promising device. The hardware's clearly capable and the software is mostly there, with the features I'm really missing being ones that shouldn't be hard to implement[2]. But those features are pretty glaring, and right now they make this less functional than the Sony, let alone the Kindle. I'm also kind of surprised that it doesn't ship with any kind of cover at all. There's ample opportunity for physical trauma to turn one of these into a paperweight.

Side note: My nook managed to include the QA checklist slip, presumably by accident. The nook's internal manufacturing designation appears to be "X2", and mine was built on 2009/11/25. Which would seem optimistic for an intended shipping date in the US of 2009/11/30, which does support the idea that the shipping delay was due to some kind of delay in the hardware production.

[1] Presented on the LCD panel
[2] Of course, this being closed-source, I can't do so myself. Sigh.

Syndicated 2009-12-10 23:33:38 from Matthew Garrett

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