It was 2:00 pm when the guy in the brown uniform knocked on my door with a brown box in his hand. The Nook had arrived!

By 2:30 I had finished setting it up, charging the battery, registering at Barnes and Noble, and downloading a few free items. I also brought over a few books from my PC that I had been reading using B&N’s PC reader software.

The Nook looks good: sleek design. Though a bit smaller in overall dimensions, the Nook’s screen is the same size as Kindle and Sony—6”. All in all, it’s a nice looking device. (See a photo of the Nook beside a Kindle, below.)

As for reading, the default font looked similar to what I was used to on the Kindle, but when I switched to the Helvetica Neue the print looked much brighter and easier to read. My eyes need a strong contrast, and Helvetica provided it and made reading on the Nook a pleasure.

Reading, though, is only part of the experience when using an electronic reader. Operations– things like page turning, menu selection, font choice, page marking, etc. — also contribute to the pleasure (or not) of using the device. For operations, the Nook uses a small, colorful touch screen, located in a 3.5 inch panel below the reading screen. And here, the implementation of what seems like a good idea, fails.

The screen is too small and crowded for my fingers to punch or slide around on. The space allowed for the virtual keyboard is also too small for my fingers, and I often hit the key beside the one I was targeting. Correcting errors is even harder, because the back space icon is so tiny, and the response time for a screen punch is far too SLOW.

Overall, I would prefer either a larger screen, with enough room to navigate on, or some other mechanical way of controlling its function. I have nothing against touch screens, by the way. I use them on cell phones. But the Nook’s implementation of this idea is not an enhancement—it’s a detriment.

The news is better for connectivity. The Nook use AT&T 3G services for the default connection, but it also has WiFi. This is a big improvement in speed and for those times when the AT&T signal is non-existent or too weak to be useful.

Set up with my home WiFi was simple and fast, and I was soon logged on to the Barnes and Noble site. Most unfortunately, this feature is somewhat negated by the absence of a browser. This means that the B&N site is the only internet address you can reach with the Nook. At least the Kindle has a browser that lets you get on the web, although, the E Ink screens are not exactly made for easy browsing. But, it is nice to be able to do it now and then. This was a disappointment for the Nook, and to me, a major one.

On the up-side for the Nook, the downloading and PC connections for transferring books, magazines and pictures work well. I had no trouble bringing in non-B&N content. It reads ePub and PDF files easily, as well as its own native format. The only hitch I ran into was that to put a non-B&N content on the Nook, it must be downloaded into the directory for magazines, newspapers and personal documents.

The Nook does not have a voice reader, which some find handy.  Being read to by a computerized voice is not my idea of a good time, buy my wife likes it, and, she says, it helps her read faster and with better comprehension.  The Kindle wins on this issue.

The last crimp in the Nook is that it froze up on me overnight. I put it to bed with the screen saver on, as they recommend. But, next morning, it would not wake up. I tried everything I know, but nothing worked. Finally I exercised the nuclear option: I removed the back, took the battery out and then put it back in. That did it. The Nook awoke and was ready for work. But, that shouldn’t happen. It usually means a software glitch that the programmers did not anticipate when they wrote the code, so a software fix is probably in the mix sometime in the future.

This was the last straw, and prompted me to make an appointment with the guys in brown again to pick up what they had dropped off. A return trip to a Texas warehouse is called for, and I won’t be seeing a Nook again.

It is a nice looking machine with some excellent features. But the negatives are too serious for me to keep it. I’ll try again when the Nook II is released.

Ray Hendon