What do you think about the Nook Color?

[Courtnee Johnson]

Hi, I am interested in purchasing the nook color and would like to know more owner perspectives on it. Major use for reading of course, but is it true you can take online college classes on it like a computer, use facebook, listen to music for free, et. Please let me know what you think about the devise. Pros, cons, anything and everything. Thank you!

[tylercaulfield]

First of all I will say it is the best LCD touch screen ereader out there for the price. I would also like to apologize if this review is too long. The Nook Color can handle books from Barnes and Noble as well as any ebooks that aren't protected, very, very well. The amount of memory the machine has can be expanded to huge amounts thru a micro SD card, something almost none of the much more expensive tablets like the ipad or blackberry playbook can do. It comes with 8gigs worth of internal memory and can be expanded with an additional 32gigs! Thats 40gigs of space for less than half the 16gig ipad! And most ebooks are tiny files, less size than even a song!

Now, before we even get into the Nook Color, you have to first ask mainly what your going to be reading. If its just going to be novels Nook Color may be a bit of overkill. Eink screens are awesome for two reasons, they look just like paper and they use very little battery. So an eink reader that will give you a months worth of reading in the Nook color will need a charge every other day or so after heavy use, especially if your using wifi. If you want more than just novels, you want a few apps, you want music and color pictures from the magazines you might buy, the Nook Color is the way to go. If you want to be able to read in the dark. Its the most sound economic choice.

Is the ipad or an android tablet like the xoom or the samsung galaxy 10.1 better? Yes, but your going to spend an extra 250 dollars at the very minimum and in my opinion they are not as comfortable to read a book on since their so big. The Nook Color 7" screen is just the right size.

So here are some pros and cons:

It can handle any ebook from Barnes and Noble including any ebook you may have that is not "protected" from your own computer. It has the ability to change fonts and text style with ease on any ebook.

It has a lend feature that you can use to borrow books for a certain amount of time from friends, haven't really tried this but some forums are there to help out.

It can move books onto the home screen and you can move in and out of different books with ease. You can leave some of the books your reading there and archive the rest. Any book you buy from Barnes and Noble is yours and yours forever. I had an old Nook and it was stolen from me, I got a new one as a Father's day present and as soon as you link it to your account, Boom! My book is there and ready for me.

Wifi is great, I have cable internet and a cheap wifi router I bought at Target and it can hook up to it no problem. Internet is good, better than any of the cheaper tablets or kindle. Some sites even worked better than on my ipod! Some will give you trouble, but usually you can work with it. Youtube works.

It can even handle the new Enhanced Ebooks that include videos and music, a very cool feature that is extra in the books and usually cost the same as the regular ebook. Imagine a book describing a location or a dish and if you want you push a button and boom theres a video showing it to you.

That being said, the speakers suck. Some videos seem to be louder than others and even though earphones help it still isn't as good as my ipod or laptop. Also since the speakers are in the back some cases will make it worse, while the loose fitting cases seem to make the sound better. Then again almost no small speakers are good. I have a Blackberry Playbook and its speakers are great, but it costs 500 dollars and still doesn't have a Nook or Kindle app so there goes that.

It has Pandora and the music played thru there sounds a bit louder and better. As long as your on wifi it can work great. Turn it on and then open a book and your good to go.

It has a facebook/twitter app and it works ok, its free, but it isn't anything to scream about. Basic functions only, post a message or read other's updates.

There are other apps, Angry Birds that work decent. Documents for writing a word file if you need to, some are free and most are under 5 dollars.

Magazines look great on the Nook, I subscribe to 3 regular magazines: Esquire, Time and Foreign Affairs, I am going to switch all 3 to Nook subscriptions. Article view lets you read the articles without having to flip pages, and now in one device you can carry your magazines, books and music.

Only con with that is it is heavier than the kindle or nook simple. But its still lighter than the ipad or those other tablets.

Hope this helped, if you have any other questions hit me up with an email, I'm more than happy to help.

[grow]

The Nook Color also offers newspapers delivered daily, but we're not quite as psyched on the layout of the traditional dailies. We found the page ordering and design of these digital editions confusing and clunky. There's likely a hybrid of what Barnes & Noble is doing with magazines and what the company does with books for these publications -- but the current state of daily papers is a bit of a mess on the platform.