Like a much-awaited new book, the reviews of Barnes & Noble’s nook e-reader are coming in — and many are not exactly thumbs-up. Several major reviewers have criticized the device, which has been touted as the major competitor to Amazon’s Kindle, as slow and clunky.
David Pogue of The New York Times, in a review Wednesday titled Not Yet the Season for a Nook, wrote that “every one of the nook’s vaunted distinctions come fraught with buzz-kill footnotes.”
‘Balky and Non-Responsive’
He said the small color touchscreen feels “disconnected” from the larger black-and-white screen above, the touchscreen is “balky and non-responsive,” and it takes almost three seconds to turn a page.
He also noted that Kindle’s e-books are less expensive than the nook’s, there’s no notification or log-in capability for the nook to identify a Wi-Fi hot spot, and, when he tested it, the nook locked up twice and crashed twice. In short, he wrote, “the nook is a mess.”
In a review Wednesday, the Associated Press’ Peter Svensson similarly criticized the nook’s two-screen approach for making the user travel back and forth to navigate, all the while delayed by the slowness of the main screen.
While the nook comes in for specific criticism from Svensson, he also criticized the electronic-ink technology used for the main screen and in most e-readers. On the plus side, the E Ink technology resembles a printed page in its resolution and doesn’t require a lot of power. But, as Svensson noted, the screens are only black and white and, more important for the user experience, are slow to move between screens.
As an example, he said simply clicking to highlight one book title in a list of titles on the E Ink screen could take a second or so. For most users of modern computers, a second to get…