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  • Introduction

  • Front

  • Back

  • Sides

  • Size Comparisons

  • In the Box

  • Handling

  • Screen

  • Indoor & Outdoor Use

  • Controls

  • Connectivity

  • Battery Life

  • Reading Books

  • Buying Books

  • eBook Formats

  • Newspapers & Magazines

  • eBook Battery Life

  • Music & Audio Controls

  • Music & Audio Management

  • Music & Audio Formats

  • Music & Audio Battery Life

  • Video Controls

  • Video Management

  • Video Formats

  • Internet Video

  • Video Battery Life

  • Email

  • Web Browsing

  • Internet Apps

  • Other Internet Features

  • Device & Specs

  • Screen

  • Battery

  • eReader

  • Internet

  • Device & Specs

  • Screen

  • Battery

  • eReader

  • Internet

  • Device & Specs

  • Screen

  • Battery

  • eReader

  • Internet

  • Conclusion

  • Introduction
  • Front
  • Back
  • Sides
  • Size Comparisons
  • In the Box
  • Handling
  • Screen
  • Indoor & Outdoor Use
  • Controls
  • Connectivity
  • Battery Life
  • Reading Books
  • Buying Books
  • eBook Formats
  • Newspapers & Magazines
  • eBook Battery Life
  • Music & Audio Controls
  • Music & Audio Management
  • Music & Audio Formats
  • Music & Audio Battery Life
  • Video Controls
  • Video Management
  • Video Formats
  • Internet Video
  • Video Battery Life
  • Email
  • Web Browsing
  • Internet Apps
  • Other Internet Features
  • Device & Specs
  • Screen
  • Battery
  • eReader
  • Internet
  • Device & Specs
  • Screen
  • Battery
  • eReader
  • Internet
  • Device & Specs
  • Screen
  • Battery
  • eReader
  • Internet
  • Conclusion

Introduction

Front

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Back

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Sides

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Size Comparisons

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In the Box

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As well as the Nook Color itself, you get:

  • Power/USB cable
  • Power adapter
  • Quick Start guide

The quick start guide is very basic, but is enough to get you started. A fuller manual is offered on the device as a PDF file.

Handling

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The Nook Color is a fairly small device at just 0.48 inches thick, but it is heavy, weighing in at a rather hefty 15.8 ounces. It is possible to hold it in one hand, but it is a little too heavy to hold comfortably in one hand for longer periods. Instead, we found ourselves more naturally holding it in two, with one hand occasionally moving to the touch screen to flip the page.

There are no physical page flip buttons on the Nook Color. Instead, the device uses the touch screen: a quick tap on the right side goes to the next page, and a tap on the left to the previous. A longer touch is used to highlight a word or piece of text for highlighting or clipping. There are physical buttons for power and volume, though on the left and right sides respectively.

Screen

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The Nook Color is built around a 7-inch LCD screen, with a resolution of 1024 by 600 pixels. The front of the screen is coated with an anti-glare material that partially blocks reflections.

Indoor & Outdoor Use

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The Nook Color uses an LCD screen, which means that the brightness of the screen comes from a backlight. The upside of this is that the device doesn’t have to rely on the ambient light: it can be used in total or near darkness with no problem. However, the downside of this approach is that in brighter lighting conditions, the backlight has to fight with the ambient light for your attention, and this poses an issue for the Nook Color. We found that the device looked good in indoor lighting and subdued sunlight, but in brighter or direct sun, the screen became pretty much unreadable.

Controls

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There are only a few physical controls on the Nook Color, with a power button on the left side and two volume controls on the right side. Below the screen is an n-shaped button that takes the device back to the home screen, which shows the books on the device. Everything else is controlled through the touch screen interface.

The controls on the top right side of the iPad body: volume, lock and power.

We found that the touch screen interface worked well, with the screne accurately detecting the touches and a logical layout. Those with familiarity with Google's Andriod operating system will feel instantly at home, because the Nook Color runs a version of this OS tweaked for eBook use. Books are easy to control: a touch on the right side of the screen goes to the next page, while a touch on the left side goes back a page.

Text is entered into the device through an on-screen keyboard. This is acceptable for entering short pieces of text (such as book titles or author names), but it is too small for long-term use. It does offer an audible click for feedback when it detects a key touch, but this often seems to lag from the keypress by a half second or so, which is extremely disorientating.

Connectivity

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The Nook Color includes a WiFi connection (802.11n) that can be used to both browse the web and buy books within range of a wireless network. It does not include a 3G data connection to use elsewhere, though. One interesting thing to note here is that the device allows for free use of WiFi at Barnes & Noble stores, and you can also use this to read books for free: Barnes & Noble allows you to read any eBook they sell for an hour a day for free in their stores.

Here we see a Lightning dock in its natural habitat.

Battery Life

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We found mixed results in our battery tests on the Nook Color. While the LCD screen gives it the ability to play back video, we found that it also made the battery life shorter when reading an eBook or listening to music. With the device set to the default settings for screen brightness, we were able to read an eBook for just over seven and a half hours. When playing a video, this battery life fell to five hours and 42 minutes.

The eBook battery life in particular is a concern: this is just enough for a transatlantic flight (if you grab a nap somewhere over Iceland), but it doesn't leave much in reserve. And it definitely won't work for longer trips away from a power source. Contrast this with the Kindle, which can run for many days constantly away from a power source.

Reading Books

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We found the Nook Color to be a very decent eBook reader device that shows sharp, clear text and is easy to use. However, the LCD screen can be somewhat hard on the eyes, especially given the lack of an auto brightness adjustment. If you want to turn the brightness down to use the device in a darkened room, you have to go into the display menu to do it yourself.

Once you get the brightness setting right, the Nook Color is easy to use, with page turning quickly (and without the annoying dip-to-black effect of the Kindle) and the text looking sharp and clear. You can also customize the look: the display menu that appears when you touch the bottom of the screen offers 6 font and text size choices and 5 color scheme options. There are also 6 options for page layout, with different margins and line spacing. That provides a lot of options, which would be particularly useful for those with sight issues: the different font sizes and color schemes provide a good range of options for making the text more readable.

The iBooks program offers a range of controls for font and text size

You can also skip around a book pretty easily, with a search feature and a content menu available from the display menu. The Contents menu provides a list of chapters, and also allows you to search for notes & highlights in the book. Custom bookmarks can also be created: a useful feature for flagging pages for later reference.

Buying Books

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When you are in range of a WiFi network, the Barnes & Noble eBook store is just a few touches away. We found this to be quick and responsive, and a search feature is immediately available. Barnes & Noble also offers previews of the books, which usually gives you the first 30 or so pages to read before you buy. These previews can be read offline, and a handy "Buy Now" button appears at the top that takes you to the store page to buy the full book.

One useful feature here is LendMe. With this, you can lend books to other Nook users for up to 14 days. After this time has expired, the book is automatically reloaded onto your device. A book can only be loaned once, though, so you won't be able to pass it around friends and family like you can with a printed book.

Books can be purchased on the iPad through the iTunes store

eBook Retailer Guide.

eBook Formats

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The Nook Color supports a limited selection of eBook formats. Although the proprietary ones (Amazon, Apple and Sony) are not supported, the Nook Color can read books in ePub, text and HTML formats. Unusually, Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint files are also supported, so you could use the Nook Color as a stand-in presentation device for a small group if required. These files can be read only, though: they cannot be edited.

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Newspapers & Magazines

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The Barnes & Noble store offers a reasonable selection of newspapers and magazines: there are 24 newspapers (with prices ranging from $6.99 to $14.99) and 98 magazines, ranging from $4.99 to $8.99 a month. The content of both newspapers and magazines are reworked from the print version to fit the screen, but the conversion seems to loose a lot less with the Nook Color than it does with the Kindle. Magazines in particular look a lot more like the originals than the Kindle versions, especially photo-heavy ones like National Geographic, which really pops out of the bright, large screen.

The New York Times is available on the iPad through their own app

eBook Battery Life

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Music & Audio Controls

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Although it is designed primarily as an eBook reader, the Nook Color can also double as a music and audio player. The music player application is on the extras menu, and it provides a basic, but adequate, set of controls. Music can be played, paused or skipped with a touch, and you can search through the music on the device by title or composer with the on-screen keyboard.

The iPod app shows the cover art while playing music

Music & Audio Management

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The Nook Color does not provide much in the way of managing the media on your device: songs are indexed by album, artist and title, but there is no way to create playlists. For a device that is based on the Android operating system, this seems like an odd approach: there are any number of excellent media player applications that they could have used, but instead they seem to have written their own. This feels rather like reinventing the wheel and coming up with a penny farthing bicycle when everyone else is riding motorbikes.

Audio files can be sorted by title, artist, album, genre or composer

Music & Audio Formats

Music & Audio Battery Life

Video Controls

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The Nook Color can double as a video player as well as an eBook reader, which adds a whole other level of use to the device. Videos look good on the 7-inch LCD screen, with bright whites and good color, but the controls on offer are somewhat basic. You play videos through the Gallery application, and this only offers basic features. When a video is playing, you can touch the screen to bring up the controls, which allow you to pause and play, rewind and fast forward and to scrub through the video by dragging the dot on the line to find the required point. This scrubbing is awkward, though: you get no preview until you stop and wait, so it is hard to find a specific time with any accuracy.

Video Management

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The management features for videos are basic, to put it mildly. The Gallery application shows you a thumbnail of all of the videos and photos stored on the device, with no way to select just videos. This means that if you have photos on the device, you could end up scrolling around a lot until you find the video you want. These thumbnails are in the order that they were loaded onto the device, with no other sorting option.

The gallery is used to navigate videos, and only offers thumbnails

Video Formats

Internet Video

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No support is offered for accessing internet video.

Video Battery Life

Email

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No email support is offered on this device: the only way to read email is to use the web browser.

The iPad email app is basic, but adequate for most users

Web Browsing

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The Nook offers a basic, but quite usable, web browser which offers bookmarking and support for JavaScript. By default, the Webkit-based browser zooms out so the entire page fits onto the long, thin screen, which makes the text extremely small. However, you can pinch and zoom in with a touch of the screen, and another touch on a link moves to the linked page. We wouldn't want to spend a long browsing session using this web browser, but it is more than adequate for checking the news or sports scores, and is easier to use and better looking than the Kindles experimental browser.

The iPad boasts a fully featured Safari web browser

Although the built-in browser of the Nook Color does a very good job of rendering HTML, it does not support Flash, Java or any plugins. So, you cannot stream video to the device or browse pages that use anything beyond normal HTML.

Internet Apps

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The Nook Color includes a small number of built in applications, including the Pandora streaming audio app, a crossword app and Soduku and Chess games. No other apps are available, because the device does not support any downloaded apps or an app store.

Other Internet Features

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The Nook Color has some basic social media features, allowing you to post clipped text to Twitter or Facebook. This could be a useful or irritating feature, depending on how much your friends like your excerpts from classic literature or romance novels. We'd recommend sticking with the former.

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Device & Specs

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These two devices are very different: the Nook Color is a small, sleek device, while the iPad is a large, somewhat clumsy to hold device. But that extra size gives the iPad the advantage of having a bigger battery (and longer battery life), a bigger screen and offering more capacity for music and video.

Screen

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Both devices offer LCD screens that work in much the same way. This means they both have the same advantages (wide contrast, visibility in low light) and disadvantages, such as they way they fade in direct sunlight. The iPad performed slightly better in daylight and had a very slightly wider contrast range, but neither device is really suited to reading by the pool.

Battery

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Both devices had enough juice for a short commute, but the iPad lasted longer than the Nook Color in our tests. So, the Apple device would be more suited for use on a longer trip or if you regularly travel away from a power source.

eReader

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We found that both devices performed well as eBook readers, producing clean, sharp text on the screen. However, many people find LCD screens uncomfortable to use for longer periods, so if you want to read a lot of eBooks, you might be better off with a Kindle or other eInk device.

Internet

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The iPad is the clear winner as an internet device, offering a much wider set of Internet features on the device itself, and allowing for much more expandability through the App Store.

Device & Specs

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Both of these devices are well priced at under $200. But the Kindle offers a little more: for $189 you get a 3G cellular data connection that allows you to buy books further afield, while the Nook Color can only buy books within range of a WiFi connection.

Screen

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The Kindle uses an eInk screen, which means that it can only display black and white. By contrast, the Nook Color uses an LCD screen that offers full color display. While that might sound like a one-sided battle, both types have their advantages. The eInk screen of the Kindle can be used in any light from near darkness to high noon in the desert: the text will still be visible on the screen. The LCD screen of the Nook Color is only usable in low to moderate light: anything higher drowns out the backlight of the screen and renders it unreadable.

Battery

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The battery life of these two devices could not be more different: we found that the Nook Color could only run for just under eight hours reading an eBook, while the Kindle could keep going for days. This may not be important if you are using this device for a daily commute, but it would be a pain for a long flight: the Nook Color could run out halfway there, while the Kindle would be good for there and back again.

eReader

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The Kindle is the winner when used as an eBook reader: the screen is usable in a wider range of lighting conditions, and the device keeps going for longer. The Nook Color performs pretty well as an eBook reader as well, though, although the LCD screen limits the usability of the device somewhat.

Internet

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Both devices offer basic web browsing features, but the screen of the Nook Color is more suited to this task, as the Kindle eInk screen is not good at the constant updating and scrolling that web browsing requires. Neither device offers any support for email.

Device & Specs

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Screen

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The Sony Reader Daily uses an eInk screen, which means that it can only display black and white. By contrast, the Nook Color uses an LCD screen that offers full color display. While that might sound like a one-sided battle, both types have their advantages. The eInk screen of the Sony Reader can be used in any light from near darkness to high noon in the desert: the text will still be visible on the screen. The LCD screen of the Nook Color is only usable in low to moderate light: anything higher drowns out the backlight of the screen and renders it unreadable.

Battery

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eReader

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Both readers include basic web browsers, but the Nook Color one is superior because the screen is better suited to showing web pages.

Internet

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Conclusion

Performance

The Nook provides an interesting alternative to the Kindle that is only a little more expensive. It offers a wider set of features than the Kindle, adding more useful audio support and video. However, these features are somewhat crippled by a lack of a way to organize the media: there is no way to create playlists for audio and you have to scroll through a long list to find a video. The Nook Color does do well as an eBook, reader though, with a bright clear screen

Screen Performance

The IPS LCD screen of the Nook Color is a bright, clear screen that looks good in most lighting conditions. There are two problems that make it less useful, though: the lack of an auto screen brightness feature means you have to adjust the screen brightness manually, and the screen gets really difficult to read in direct sunlight. It certainly is not the only one with this issue (all LCD screens have this), but that doesn't make it any less of a problem for a product designed to be used on the road.

Battery Life

The battery life of the Nook Color is best described as adequate. At just under eight hours for eBook reading or under six hours for video, it is enough for a daily commute or a short plane flight. But it is not long enough to keep you going on a week in your cabin in the woods without power, or to accompany you hiking the highlands. In both situatiuons, the Kindle would be better, because the battery life of that device is measured in days, not hours.

Ereader:

The Nook Color is an excellent eBook reader, with a screen that renders text sharply and cleanly. The only issues are the screen failing in bright light and the limitations of it being tied to the Barnes & Noble store only.

Audio & Video:

The Nook Color can handle both audio and video, and the latter look good on the bright, clear screen. However, there is no good way to organize audio or video: you cannot create playlists of music, and the only way to play a video is to scroll manually through a list of video and photo thumbnails until you find the right one. Compared to a device like the iPad or the Samsung Tab, the Nook Color looks primitive as a media player.

Email & Web Browsing:

No email support is offered on the Nook Color, but it does include a surprisingly good web browser, which does a very decent job of rendering complex web pages. It also supports JavaScript and bookmarks, but there is no support for Flash, Java or other plugins that add to the functions of the browser.

Meet the tester

Richard Baguley

Richard Baguley

Contributor

@@rbaguley

Richard Baguley is a veteran writer who has written about technology ranging from Alphabet to Zip file utilities. He has contributed to pretty much every major tech publication, including Amiga Format Magazine, PC World, Wired, CNET, Toms Guide, Forbes, and many others. He lives in the Boston metro area with his wife, dog, and an indeterminate number of cats.

See all of Richard Baguley's reviews

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