Posted by The Blogging Desk on Thu, May 26, 2011
This is my next:
Barnes & Noble just announced its all-new Nook, with an E Ink screen and zero shenanigans. It’s being subtitled “The Simple Touch Reader,” with a single 6-inch black and white touchscreen. There’s obviously no physical keyboard, which shaves off 10 percent of the “bulk” in comparison to the Kindle 3. Barnes & Noble also made sure to drive other points of comparison home, like “80 percent less flashing” (that black screen flash that you get during E Ink page turns) and double the battery life (two months). The touchscreen works with IR technology, which should hopefully mitigate some of the problems with E Ink touchscreens and decreased readability — in fact, B&N promises a 50 percent improvement over the original Nook. For storage there’s 2GB built-in and a microSDHC slot for swapping in your copy of Proust, with a WiFi connection for snagging new titles (but no 3G). Under the hood there’s a 800MHz TI OMAP3 processor, running Android 2.1. — or your custom mod of choice once the hackers get ahold of this.
Barnes & Noble looks to be finally ahead of Amazon in the eBook hardware game. The Kindle 3 was released nearly a year ago and has gotten long in the tooth. It seems like B&N has now taken the top spot thanks to this hardware revision.
This verion of the Nook ditches the convoluted double screen of a previous model and also has no colors. But, it also adds touch capability.
I recently purchased a Kindle 3 for my bookworm of a mother. I had a few days to set it up for her and was amazed at how great the weight of the Kindle was. It was incredibly light when compared to reading on my iPad. I made a mean kielbasa dinner while reading a book on the Kindle. Both were equally delicious. PDF rendering was also smooth. So smooth that more enterprise companies should be handing these bad boys out on a regular basis.
My guess is Amazon has a whole slew of form factors coming down the pike. I would imagine a redesigned Kindle, but also a color tablet running a modified version of Android. Either way, readers win.
