iTodd Central

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NOOK, Kindle Pricing Make Plastic Readers More Attractive

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via barnesandnoble.com

Confluence of events -- over my vacation I started reading the "Girl Who..." trilogy at the behest of Ms. D and her friend Ms. H, and they're good. Very entertaining. I don't have the third one, which I plan to procure.

Meanwhile, this weekend while trying to kill some time waiting for Ms. D while she got her glasses fixed, I was in a Best Buy and got to fumbling around with the Nook. I found it interesting -- a bit tough to navigate initially, but then it kicked in and starting doing some cool stuff. Ultimately it got me thinking that a nice little reader of some kind could be what the doctor ordered -- might even be how I decide to read "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest."

Later, it occurred to me that the Kindle had also lowered it's prices as well. (Congrats, Amazon -- marketing works.) So I went to Amazon and floated around on the site for a while and *almost* bought one this weekend.

Since I've pretty much been wrapped up in the idea of getting an iPad (when the stars align and the $500+ makes sense), I haven't thought much about a Kindle or Nook. Now I'm second guessing that.

Things I would use it for -- reading books (a plus for Kindle or Nook over iPad, IMHO) as well as for some quick surfing from my easy chair -- I like to read Wikipedia and IMDB entries about movies I've just watched. While buzzing around the Amazon.com site, I also got in my head the possibility that I might consume the New York Times on a regular basis if I had it in a fabulously portable format.

Advantages to the iPad, of course, are that I would also use it for app development and testing (for JFP and BOOM) as well as more in-depth surfing, perhaps some Netflix watching, documents, perhaps even sales, PDFs, flipbooks (again for sales or for demo-ing our publications) and other things I haven't thought about, like GTD processing.

But, iPad is $500 down the road and these things are less expensive. And enticing. And shiny (actually, rather matte, but you know what I mean). Hmm.

Update: Living with My Hero

Time flies! I've had my Hero about two-and-a-half months, now, and, for the most part, I'm enjoying using it. I've found it's a much better e-mail machine than my Blackberry Pearl was, and I enjoy the on-screen keyboard more than I did the two-letters-per-key approach of the Pearl. I enjoy the apps and find that I'm using the phone to pass the time, access vital weather information and for great maps when traveling -- another serious advance over my Blackberry.

(I type mostly in portrait mode, oddly, but that's probably because the Hero is slow when switching to Landscape.)

The problems are easy to identify -- speed and battery life. With all the discussion in the past few weeks about the iPad's lack of multitasking, I sometimes pine for that problem with my Hero; between the fact that it runs background apps and some of those apps don't even have a Quit option (quality varies widely) I've found that the Hero can slow down significantly, to the point where background apps can interfere with your ability to make or answer calls. That's annoying.

HTC Sense is pretty, but I'm hoping an update (rumored to be happening soon) will speed it up. If not, I'm tempted to figure out if I can remove it and run a more basic Android interface; my experience is that the widgets are so slow to update that I end up opening applications anyway. The HTC Mail app is so slow that I switched to K-9 Mail for IMAP access to my work account; the Sense weather widget is so slow that, instead, I just launch The Weather Channel app a few times every day, which is actually really fast.

As for battery life -- it's  pretty annoying to get toward the end of the work day and realize that my phone won't make it into the evening; I've got a charger at the house and at my desk, but if I forget to plug it in, I'm in trouble.

Recently when traveling I had charged the phone before my afternoon flight, had it off for the five hours I was on a plane; and still the battery was nearly gone by the time I was at baggage claim at 11 p.m.

Verdict: not perfect, more work to be done, and the updates aren't coming that fast. Having said all that, it's a remarkable device and the OS experience is certainly serviceable. The "app wars" are on, although I was more than pleased when Issuu (m.issuu.com) came out with an Android version of their "flipbook" reader first -- now you can get the JFP and Boom Jackson on your Android phone (with iPhone coming soon).