the .: fyr :. light

I blogged about my visit to the Bell County Museum last week but what I didn’t mention was that on the way back home, as pained up as I was, I had to make a stop at the Barnes and Noble to see if they had received their demo Nook.

I walked in, took my customary deep breath at the door (just because I SO love the smell of the place) and made a beeline for the Customer Service desk. As luck would have it, there was an empty stand on one corner of the desk for the nook – obviously fairly recently occupied by a nook, but now looking quite lonely. I stood around looking sorry for myself before I noticed that there were actually TWO such stands, one that I had strode right past without noticing that it was occupied.

Let me warn you now, I took no pictures simply because in the space of about 15 minutes of playing with the nook, I had no less than 4 employees walk by asking me if I needed anything. The last thing I wanted was to have to explain to them not only why I was still standing at the desk fiddling with the thing, but why I was also snapping photos of it. I abhor confrontation, and I didn’t need to be dispatched from the store on my behind.

Needless to say, I took a moment to LOOK at it. Memorize what it looked like because I knew I wasn’t going to be seeing it again anytime soon. It looked smaller than the Kindle to me – smaller in terms of width and height. The separate screens are obvious as you look at it – the top screen larger than the bottom, but clearly not as large as the Kindle’s reading screen as was pointed out to me in the comments, the reading screen is actually the same size as the Kindle’s. That told me there would be less text on screen per “page”. The photo that was on screen being displayed as the screen saver was quite eye-catching too – picture of a castle-like structure with very noticeable turrets and a tree in the foreground.

When I picked it up, immediately I realized that it is not only thicker than the Kindle, but heavier. Not heavier by much, but definitely noticeable. The reviews were correct in that for people with small hands, such as myself (and those who also tend to have joint aches), holding the nook one-handed would be a slight challenge over a long period of time.

The buttons are far less complicated – 2 on the left, 2 on the right – for forward or backward navigation. The center “n” icon for the nook is like a menu button. Once pressed it displays the top-level nook menu “the daily, my library, shop, reading now, and settings” in the color screen at the bottom of the device.

Now I have to tell you that I instantly saw what people have been complaining about most: it is slow as all heck. I touched the “my library” menu option and sat there for a few seconds, before pressing again, and again, and again, and again … before something finally happened, and when it did, it happened in a big way. Of course, the touches are “queued” so all the repeat touches queued up to give me a mess of actions once the device actually responded in the first place.

No matter, unlike my usual ability to crash just about any device that is handed to me, it stayed on and functioning and I could press the little “n” symbol and get back to the main menu and try again.

When I finally got the “tour” open (it was the only book on the in-store nook to sample), it took a few minutes to draw the page “Please wait while we format the page for you” – a very polite message explaining the delay in seeing the text, but no less annoying.

The good news is that the navigation buttons are quite easy to click. On the Kindle, I have to sometimes press a little harder than normal to push the button down. On the nook, the next and previous buttons are recessed so pressing them accidentally is assumedly not going to be as easy as it was with the Kindle 1.

As I blogged once before, 2 features of the nook entice me:

1. WiFi capabilities make it easy to use just about anywhere without the restrictions of the cell network.
2. The ability to lend a book to a friend. As with anything of that nature, it is restricted to lending one book to someone else just once and for only 2 weeks in duration. The good part of it is that it doesn’t matter what reading device the other person has – a computer, pda, kindle, iphone – the book can be loaned in PDF format and hence readable on just about anything else.
Additionally, however, while in-store, playing around with the nook, I discovered a third feature that makes me even more want to run out and get one right now:
3. The ability to completely customize how my page looks – I can change font, font size, orientation …

It was while I was playing around with the customizing functions that I had my 4th visit from customer service personnel and realized that chances are I was beginning to look a little odd standing there playing with the nook for the past 10 – 15 minutes or so. It was probably best to put it down and make my way slowly away from the counter so that they wouldn’t call security (and they might have already done so and I wouldn’t have been aware so engrossed I was in the nook).

Reading today that there may be a firmware (software?) upgrade for the nook scheduled for later this week makes me think “hmm, I may just have to pay another visit to see if the update does anything snazzy”. Regardless of how it seems inferior to the Kindle 2 at this point in time, I am determined that at some point in the near future, I will indeed be investing in a nook of my own. It might actually be prudent to wait and see whether a year from now a nook 2 (new and improved?) becomes available and wait until then.