Kathleen McGivney

The 60-second review: B&N's nook e-reader

I've wanted an e-reader for a while now, mainly because my book collection has gotten out of hand. I figured that the only way to avoid having to line every wall of my house with bookshelves was to get an e-reader. I compared the features of the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, and Barnes & Noble Nook, and decided on the Nook. I pre-ordered it in November and got it last night. I took a quick tour, downloaded a couple of books, and have a few likes and dislikes, but overall I am pretty satisfied.

Build quality: The Nook feels very solid and well-made in the hand. It's a good size, measuring 7 3/4" high x 5" wide x 1/2" thick. It's nice and sturdy. The buttons for page turning are part of the plastic casing and are flush with it, but have little nubs so you can feel them in low light. Very nicely designed.

Setup: Setup was very simple. Charge the device fully, turn it on, sign in with your B&N account. The Nook automatically connected to an available wireless signal (it uses AT&T's network). The touchscreen keyboard is big enough that I didn't fat-finger anything when signing in, but it was a little slow to react, causing me to type a couple of letters twice. Easily fixed with a backspace, but the responsiveness could use a little speeding up.

Browsing e-books: Browsing e-books and your library is simple. The main touchscreen menu has five sections: The Daily, which contains blogs, daily subscriptions, and the like; My Library, which contains... you guessed it, your library; Shop, where you can buy stuff; Reading Now, which takes you back to whichever book you were reading last (handy!); and Settings, where you can adjust things like the contrast of the screen. I hit up the Shop section first, to buy some books. I used both the Browse Categories and Search functions, and found them both fairly self-explanatory, though I had some issues with the response time of touches on the touchscreen again. It seems to be a software issue, not a hardware one, as it does eventually catch up if I've touched the screen multiple times, so I'm hoping the next firmware upgrade will resolve it.

The other thing I had an issue with is scrolling. If there are more categories than will fit on the touchscreen, you can scroll to view additional ones by swiping your finger on the touchscreen. You swipe up to scroll down, and down to scroll up, which is a little counterintuitive, but works. However, the swipe gesture and the "throw" gesture (as mentioned in the Nook User Guide) are very similar, and the throw gesture causes the list to continue scrolling after you lift your finger up, which is a little annoying. With practice, I'm sure my scrolling will stabilize and annoy me less.

Anyway, since my Nook is registered with my existing B&N account, which has a stored credit card, I was able to purchase books easily with just a couple of touches - one on the book's main page and one to confirm (a step which is necessary, in my opinion, on a touch-based device). Once the book is downloaded, the Nook tells you it'll be in your library within a couple of minutes.

Reading: After purchasing my books, including Death From The Skies! by my awesome friend Phil Plait (a book I highly recommend!), I went into my library to read it. Navigation of books is very simple, and you can skip to different chapters via the table of contents. Turning pages is accomplished by either pressing the next page or previous page buttons on the sides of the Nook or swiping horizontally on the touchscreen. I found the default contrast easy to read and the default font size was a good size, though these are both adjustable in the settings if needed. 

Selection: The e-book selection at B&N is really good, with a wide variety of both new and classic books available. The magazine selection is pretty sparse at the moment, but I think that will improve eventually. There are four newspapers available - Financial Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and Chicago Tribune. I'm hoping the NY Times will join up at some point, but I'm not holding my breath. However, for my main use of the device (books), the selection is great and well-organized.

Overall, I am pretty pleased with the purchase and plan to use the Nook extensively while traveling. In fact, I'll be taking it with me on our next trip without any other backup reading material. There are some minor glitches, but overall the Nook seems to be a great product. 

Some photos of the device in use after the jump.

Nokia N82: a very unscientific review

Camera cat with cameras, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

As I mentioned last week, I picked up a Nokia N82 smartphone after an unsuccessful experiment with a Nokia N95. I have been using it pretty much nonstop for about a week now, and have a review and summary of it. My review concentrates on two things: usability compared to a Blackberry Pearl and photographic capabilities.

First, usability: I had a Nokia model before I had the Blackberry Pearl, so I was able to get used to Nokia's interface again very quickly. I found that moving around the interface was intuitive, and there are many things I liked over the Pearl, including the gallery interface (much slicker on the N82, with a rotating menu, and much, much faster than the Pearl). I also very much like that the screen tilts if you turn the phone on its side, much like the iPhone, but I think that is mostly beneficial for scrolling, as typing in that position is quite difficult. The browser on the N82 is approximately one billion times better than the limited browser on the Pearl, but that can be worked around by using Opera for the Blackberry, which is much better than the native BB browser.

What I found lacking on the N82 versus the Pearl are: predictive text, ease and feel of button navigation, and a couple of minor "number of clicks" issues. Predictive text on the Pearl is amazing and can figure out most words very easily (though I had to train it to cuss; when I first used it, I said "duck" and "shut" a lot). The N82 uses T9, which gets things wrong enough that I just turn it off and resort to multi-tap. I was very fast at it before I got the Pearl, though, and it's only taken me a week to get close to my pre-Pearl texting speeds.

Button navigation on the N82 is easy, but some of the buttons are very close together, which makes it very easy to accidentally press the wrong or multiple buttons. The Pearl's scroll wheel is much easier to use than the Nokia's scroll buttons. And for some apps like Gmail, I have to tell the phone that the application is allowed to access the internet every time I open it on the N82. Not so with the Pearl. Annoying, but I can work around it.

What's really special about the N82, and my main deciding factor in keeping it, is its camera. It packs a 5 megapixel camera into a fairly compact phone, with a Zeiss lens, real autofocus (with an assist light for low-light situations), and a real Xenon flash. The camera in this phone is enough to replace your casual point & shoot camera. The flash is much more powerful than any LED flash on any cameraphone I have handled in the past and works well in low-light situations (see bar images below). All of the photos in this entry were taken with the N82 and I am very happy with the image quality. Also a bonus are the Flickr and Vox integration features that are included out of the box; once configured, I can post a photo directly to my Flickr photo stream via the internet instead of sending it via MMS. And since the phone has built-in WiFi capabilities, if I am near a wireless access point, I can use that instead of my cell phone data plan to upload the images.

All in all, I think that the Nokia N82 is an excellent phone for someone who likes photography and is a heavy web user. If your primary use of your mobile device is work-related e-mail, the Blackberry is better suited for what you are doing. But for someone like me, who needs a fully capable multimedia device, the N82 is perfect.

More photos after the jump.

Nokia N95: Hello and goodbye

For the past couple of months, I've wanted a new mobile phone that really addresses my personal requirements for a mobile device - a great camera, excellent web capabilities, and good phone quality. GPS is a good bonus but not a showstopper if the device doesn't have it. I've been eyeing the Nokia N95 for a while now, and as is my wont when Apple makes an announcement regarding the iPhone, I bought one last night. (I bought my current phone, the BlackBerry Pearl, the day the iPhone came out. What? I like to defy Steve Jobs, or as Warren Ellis called him, Bay Area Moses.)

I went to the Nokia flagship store in midtown Manhattan last night with the ol' ball and chain and we manhandled both the regular N95 and the 8GB model. I read a bunch of reviews before going there, and was prepared for the feel of the device - the build quality feels a little flimsy, not how I'd expect a high-end phone to feel. But the features fit my requirements, and we took home an N95 8GB model. However, after playing with the setup last night, it is going back to the store today.

My main problem with the device is volume control. The N95 has powerful speakers for playing music. When we were in the store, Atom stumbled across a video that was on the demo phone and it started playing very loudly. He pressed the volume control buttons and nothing happened. Thinking it was just a problem with the demo model, we moved on. However, when I got it home and began changing ringtones, I noticed the same problem - as I scrolled through each ringtone, I was unable to change the volume on them using the volume buttons. After checking some Nokia user forums, I discovered that this is a known problem with some applications and games - if the game does not have built-in volume controls, you either have to play it on full volume or mute, because the volume buttons have no effect. This strikes me as odd since volume control is very, very basic functionality and I know that past Nokia models have had the ability to control volume no matter what application you are using. My roommate, who knows stuff about things, says that the ability to control volume no matter what you're doing is native in the Symbian OS, so I don't really understand why it works this way. I'd assume I got a dud device, but since the one in the store also does this, I have to assume that this is how it works on this phone, and that's the main reason why it's going back. The other major reasons are mostly usability and build quality issues, the biggest of which is the lack of lens cover for the camera.

I've been doing some more research today and may get an N82 instead - it has the same 5MP camera, but with a Xenon flash instead of the N95's weak LED flash, as well as most of the features of the N95 that I like. According to reviews, its build quality feels more solid as well. And it has a lens cover. We're going to the Nokia store tonight to test it out - and we'll pay much closer attention to those volume controls this time.