Barnes & Noble Nook Color Review: A Screen Caught Between Two Worlds [Video]

Tablets, tablets everywhere-even at the book store. So here’s an issue: Is Barnes & Noble ‘s Nook Color a tablet or an ereader? It’s actually something in between. And it’s only $250…

You can contemplate the Nook Color as a stripped-down tablet or a really fancy ebook reader. Not to get overly philosophical about it, but that context will ultimately determine how you’re feeling. For now, you’ll be much happier whenever you reflect on it as the latter. Nevertheless it’s arguably the first seven-inch device that’s been designed to be one from the beginning, as opposed to a puffed-up phone.

This is a capable little thing, potentially the first of a new type of cheap tweener tablet with functionality that’s both broad but limited: Besides books, it delivers full color magazines and newspapers from most each of the major publishers; it should surf the net, play music and videos, even run Android apps like Pandora (if they struggle through B&N’s app store, which opens next year).

One thing’s evidently: As the first major color reader, it’s gonna be on numerous Christmas lists.

It’s dense. As in, deceptively heavy-15.8 ounces, despite being legitimately thin. The back is subtle, perfect amount of rubbery, so you won’t drop it, but you won’t get that weird hand sweatiness cheap soft-touch material sometimes generates. I’m hoping you don’t mind glare while you’re reading.

At 7 inches, this Technicolor Nook is ironically still best for reading straightforward ebooks. And it’s about nearly as good as reading is also on a backlit glass screen (more pixels and not more glare could be more better, but it surely actually bests the Kindle 3′s pixel density, 169ppi to 167). Reading stuff apart from ebooks is a fascinating set of tradeoffs, largely due to the constraints of a 7-inch screen. Magazines are presented as full-page, unreadable facsimiles of the $64000 thing, that you may zoom in and pan around. Or you should use Article View, which pops the text out from the page and reformats it in a narrow column-exactly like Safari Reader . It’s more readable, but completely breaks any fidelity to the magazine experience. Newspapers plow through similar contortions to fit: B&N reformats them in order that they’re presented an analogous way as ebooks: page by page.

It’s okay at lots of the things that fall outside of the core reading experience. (And Pandora.) The online browser works, but it surely generally tells sites it’s a desktop browser as opposed to a mobile one, so you usually get weird formatting (like with Gmail) or a website that’s too big for the Nook’s tiny ereader britches (new Twitter wreaks havoc). Mobile YouTube and Vimeo videos work, but they are available in super low-res. Still, it’s important to note that it should do this stuff.

I kept thinking how great Nook Color could be with a number of apps to actually round it out as a do-it-all reader: something like Instapaper to save lots of web articles for offline reading; Flipboard to drag in articles persons are sharing on Facebook and Twitter; a decent RSS reader. With those, it’d border on amazing.

Exactly what a 7-inch tablet should appear and feel like: extremely thin, incredibly sturdy, completely straightforward. Reading text is completely comfortable on the 1024×600 IPS display, that is the correct size for ebooks. Upgraded LendMe feature for borrowing and requesting books is cool (in case you’ve got friends with Nooks). Epub support makes grabbing and loading up your personal books easy. Full, free access to the total electronic B&N catalog while camped at their stores. The USB charger glows (!)-somewhat thing, but a pleasant touch.

And how are you going to not love the value? It overrules nearly every tradeoff and compromise.

Interaction is more chunky peanut butter than butter smooth. Animations, touch response and transitions all feel slow, even after they’re not exactly lagging, which happens a good bit-whether you’re opening books or pinch-zooming in magazines. It’s like they were animated without enough frames. Or worse, there’s no animation at all-no page turning or sliding animation for traditional ebooks (even the nook iPad app does this). New pages just appear, like an e-ink reader. In reality, interaction may be very hit-or-miss-like the original nook, over again.

The web browser has its limits: No pinch-to-zoom! The aforementioned mobile/desktop browser identity crisis, leading to formatting or slowness. Online video experience is regularly crummed out with super low-res video. I couldn’t get any of several correctly encoded videos that I loaded up throughout the SD card to run either (pictures and music worked fine).

At virtually a pound, it’s slightly heavy.

Caught between two worlds, the Nook Color is an undeniably interesting, if somewhat conflicted device. It’s not quite a tablet, however it’s more than an easy ebook reader. It is able to do things that an e-ink reader simply can’t-whether it doesn’t excel at them-nevertheless it’s nearly as cheap at $250. At half the associated fee of the Tab or iPad, in case you’re seeking out an excellent portable tablet thing primarily for reading, it’s hard not to present the Nook a significant look, in spite of the fact that you can wanna wait ’til the B&N app store opens and it gets its first major update early next year.

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This post is tagged: christmas lists, color magazines, ebook reader, glass screen, major publishers, pixel density