Nook Color eReader Review – Can You Call It a Tablet?

The Nook Color eReader by Barnes & Noble fills a unique niche in the consumer electronics market. It’s more than a reader but less than a full-blown tablet. Or, is it? Recently, Barnes and Noble updated the software and added some new apps, namely email and Nook Friends. Nook Friends is a  a new social app that allows friends to share books using the LendMe feature.  They’ve also added an app library with a couple hundred apps, not exactly the Android market, but still, quite a few cool and useful apps. The latest software update (to Android 2.2, Froyo) has increased the speed considerably – not to iPad speeds but still pretty good. Unlike the iPad, the Nook does support Flash. And, unlike the better known Amazon Kindle, that color screen is more than just pretty; it’s functional. So it the Nook Color impressive enough to be called a full-fledged tablet? In a word, yes. While still inferior to the iPad 2, Samsung Galaxy Tab, or the Xoom by Motorola, at about half the price ($249) it’s definitely an option to consider.

Like any such device, the value of the Nook starts with the display, a 7-inch touchscreen. The LED-backlit display provides good – though not great – resolution at 1,024×600 pixels, 169 ppi. Specs state 16 million colors, but consumers have become used to that somewhat inflated number, the same touted on ordinary VGA computer monitors for years.

But still, it does provide greater than standard viewing. The colors are bright and the fonts are crisp. Glare is less than you might expect, thanks to a special laminate that keeps light at bay and improves off-axis viewing. It’s also very responsive (a tribute to the electronics behind the glass, too, of course), thanks in part to the Android 2.2 OS running behind the scenes.

The Nook also offers the largest available selection of titles. It downloads books wirelessly from Barnes & Noble with ease, not surprisingly. What is a little surprising is that it can only do so via Wi-Fi. There’s no 3G connectivity available. With the plentiful supply of free Wi-Fi outside the home that probably won’t be an issue for everyone. But, for those who like to travel far and wide and want instant access to an electronic book store, it is a small limitation. On the upside, those books download in seconds. Another great feature is the ability to download free samples before you buy.

Happily, the Nook is not very limited on what it can download and display, starting with the 2 million titles B&N offers. Unlike the Kindle, the Nook supports the open-format ePub standard, so you can get books from a lot more sources than just B&N. It does a decent job with PDFs, Word, and Excel docs too, using the built-in QuickOffice software. However, it doesn’t offer quite the flexibility users are used to on a notebook PC.

In addition to books and documents – including electronic versions of more than 200 popular magazines including People, Time, Sports Illustrated, and The New York Times – the Nook will display images and even YouTube videos. It also has the ability to play audio files, including MP3 files and Pandora radio. Users of that will want to get a pair of lightweight headphones since no one wants to hear music – or even an audiobook – from a tinny speaker.

It will hold quite a lot of all those, thanks to its 8 Gb of internal memory. Also, there’s a microSD slot that supports up to 32 Gb. So, the storage capacity is, for all practical purposes, unlimited for books and magazines. Naturally, image, audio and video could fill that up but this unit is chiefly intended as an document display device, after all.

It goes beyond that eReader ability, however, with the inclusion of a functional web browser. Nothing to get Opera or Firefox software engineers nervous about, but it does the job. Its major benefit is the ability to sift through websites for ePubs and PDFs, as well as do some online shopping.

You can do that for a good long time, but not forever. The battery lasts about 8 hours of active reading, quite a bit less than the Kindle which can last a month without a recharge. It’s also twice as heavy (just under 1 lb), so users may be surprised when they first pick one up.

All in all, at the same size as the Samsung Galaxy Tab, it would be difficult to classify the Barnes & Noble Color Nook. Is it an eReader or a tablet? It does both functions, which could be seen as a drawback by some or a great niche-filler by others. You decide.

Click here to buy the Nook Color from Barnes and Noble.