Hasta La Gadget!

It’s hard not to love Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color, especially if you’re amongst those who’d rather look at text on a quality backlit screen than an e-paper display. Not only did we enjoy the e-book reader when we first reviewed it, but it keeps getting better thanks to updates to its hidden Android core plus the recent addition of its own app store complete with Pandora and Angry Birds. And while there’s also a decent bundled web browser and music player, it’s not the software that we like the most — it’s the hardware, and particularly the value proposition.

See, $250 ($200 on sale) buys you a gorgeous 7-inch 1024×600 pixel capacitive IPS panel with excellent contrast and viewing angles, an 800MHz TI OMAP 3621 CPU, a PowerVR SGX 530 GPU, 512MB RAM, WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth, 8GB of built-in storage, an accelerometer, and a microSD card slot — all wrapped in an attractive 12mm thin package. Sure, there’s no 3G radio, no camera, no microphone, no ambient light sensor, and no haptic feedback, but despite its lower-end specs, the Nook Color just begs to be turned into a full blown Android tablet.

And that’s just what we did, by installing CyanogenMod 7 on Barnes & Noble’s color reader, complete with Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) and the full suite of Google apps. Take a look at our screenshots gallery below and hit the break for our hands-on video and impressions.

Continue reading CyanogenMod 7 on the Nook Color hands-on (video)

CyanogenMod 7 on the Nook Color hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re expecting to see plenty of new features crop up for folks that have rooted their new Nook WiFi, but it looks like those not willing to go that far can still expand their options a little bit. As it happens, the new Nook has an experimental web browser of its own, which you can access simply by typing a URL into the search bar. Of course, Barnes & Noble has likely kept this feature under wraps for a reason, as actually browsing the web using it seems to be somewhat hit and miss — see for yourself in the video after the break courtesy of The eBook Reader.

Continue reading Web browser found hiding in latest Nook, no root required (video)

Web browser found hiding in latest Nook, no root required (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 13:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Many who follow the e-reader market keep coming back to the same question: how long does it realistically have left? The explosion of tablets and reader apps for smartphones have left their respective impacts on the space, while the market for devoted readers continues to be dominated by Amazon’s Kindle. Undaunted, both Kobo and Barnes & Noble launched new black and white e-readers based around the same touch and display technologies last week. After all, despite increased competition from outside the space, the reader market continues to be a vibrant one — and after the Nook Color proved it was an undercover tablet all along, Barnes and Noble has hit back with this latest Nook as proof of its focus on one thing: reading.

Continue reading Barnes & Noble Nook WiFi review

Barnes & Noble Nook WiFi review originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 12:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s all about doing new stuff, right? This week, we’re doing a lot of new stuff: paying for soda pop with our cell phones, reading books on E Ink displays, and waiting for Duke Nukem Forever. OK, well maybe none of those things are actually new, but we’re doing them in new ways this week, kind of. Listen to the podcast, is all we’re saying.

Host: Tim Stevens
Guests: Brian Heater
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Music: 10yr – Regulate

02:30 – Kobo unbuttons for $129 eReader Touch Edition, we go hands-on (video)
03:52 – Barnes & Noble announces new touch-enabled Nook for $139 (video)
13:43 – Barnes & Noble selling Nooks for $99 on eBay
18:03 – Live from Microsoft’s Windows Phone VIP preview event!
22:00 – Windows Phone ‘Mango’ search offers location-specific results, app integration (video)
29:36 – Windows Phone Mango and Bing Vision hands-on
32:05 – Live from the Google Wallet press event!
33:50 – Google Wallet mobile payment service, Google Offers announced
35:16 – Google Wallet vending on Nexus S hands-on
43:21 – Droid Incredible 2 review
48:53 – Spotify and Facebook partner up, send Europe a friend request?
50:55 – Sony makes good, doles out identity protection activation codes for PSN and Qriocity users
51:28 – TweetDeck and Twitter, together at last
54:00 – Duke Nukem Forever goes gold, will meet promised June deadline (really!)

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Download the podcast

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Contact the podcast

Send your questions to @tim_stevens.
Leave us a voicemail: (423) 438-3005 (GADGET-3005)
E-mail us: podcast at engadget dot com
Twitter: @tim_stevens @bheater

Filed under: Podcasts

Engadget Podcast 241 – 05.27.2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 May 2011 15:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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B&N says the Nook's battery lasts twice as long as the Kindle's, and Amazon doesn't like it. Photo: Lena Groeger/Wired.com

Amazon and Barnes & Noble are duking it out over the respective battery lives of the Kindle and the new touch-screen Nook. The field of battle is the ghostly ground of press releases and promo-page blurb, and the last word seems to have been had by B&N.

After B&N laid out the specs for its new e-reader, Amazon took issue with the numbers, saying that B&N’s claim rested on usage tests of just a half hour of use per day, with wireless switched off. Amazon’s usage tests assume an hour of use per day, also with wireless switched off.

So what did Amazon do? It simply doubled the battery life on the product page to reflect a half-hour daily usage. Sneaky.

B&N countered with a very detailed statement, outlining the exact tests made. It also looks like the Kindle was also tested in the same way:

With up to two months on a single charge, the all-new Nook has the longest battery life in the industry and superior battery performance to Kindle 3. In our side-by-side tests, under the exact same conditions, continuous use of the device resulted in more than two times Kindle’s battery life.

While reading at one page a minute, the all-new Nook battery lasts for 150 hours, where the Kindle battery, using the same page-turn rate, lasts for only 56 hours (both with Wi-Fi off). We’ve also done a continuous page turn test and at one page turn per second, the all-new Nook offers more than 25,000 continuous page turns on a single charge.

I love that B&N calls 150 just “two times” 56, when it could easily say “almost three times.” That shows some confidence. However this works out, it’s certain that both e-readers have insane battery life compared to any other kind of gadget. And if you’re basing your decision on this spec alone, instead of depth of catalog and ease of use, then you’re probably looking in the wrong direction.

B&N fires back at Amazon over Kindle battery life [CNET]

See Also:

• Barnes & Noble Slims, Simplifies Nook E-Book Reader
• Despite Reports, B&N Nook Competes Just Fine, Thank You