I Played with nook

Last night, the teens at our church had free babysitting. Christina had a coupon for Olive Garden, so we went. We learned from previous years though. Normally, we drop the kids off at 6:30, then find every place is busy. We spend 3 hours driving around looking for a place to eat with less than a 2 hour wait, and end up at Pizza Hut or McDonald’s before getting the kids. This time, I dropped her off at Olive Garden, took the kids to church, and got back to Olive Garden just as she was being seated. Perfect timing!

After we finished dinner, we drove across the street to Barnes & Noble. I wanted to get a look at nook. Remember, B&N is calling it nook, not The Nook, so I’m trying to stick to the same convention in my writing. I know it violates a lot of rules of the English language.

My impressions were about what I expected. It felt pretty good to hold nook. The girl at the booth didn’t seem to know a lot. I heard her tell another customer that nook is the first reader to have 3G wireless. That’s wrong; Kindle had it from the start. She did show off the Google books. I didn’t get to do a lot with nook, because a friend I hadn’t seen in several years walked in so I had to break away and chase him down.

I haven’t actually used a Kindle yet, like I said in my last post. I don’t know anybody in “real life” who has one. What I’ve read about nook is accurate. This thing LAGS! I’d hit a button, and nothing would happen, so I’d hit it again, but then the original command finally happened, so it turned out I hit something else, and then I had no idea where I was. B&N needs to fix that fast. It will be intolerable to buy one.

The girl doing the demo mentioned that B&N is talking about distributing software updates directly to the device. That would be cool.

Also, if I tell my dad “Sure, get me nook for Christmas”, I won’t see it for a long time. They’re not shipping until February 1 now. That makes me want to ask for a Kindle and hope that Amazon gets a clue and issues a software update to bridge the gap with some of nook’s capabilities. It would be fairly simple to issue a software update. I wonder if I could contact Amazon and say “I’m a blogger and I have a few questions. I’m sure at least 2 people read my blog, and might base their buying decisions on your answers. Will you be updating Kindle’s capabilities through a software update? Will you support ePub standards?”