Barnes & Noble Nook Color

Ever since the ebook reader boom began, consumers have been begging for color displays. Now Barnes & Noble has released the Nook Color ($249 direct) with a 7-inch color LCD display to satisfy this need. Color screens look amazing but these devices, the Nook Color included, come with trade-offs. Does color affect the battery life? You bet it does. And although the device runs Android and can handle some third-party apps, don't expect the functionality of a full-fledged tablet computer like the Apple iPad ($499 to $829, 4.5 stars) or the Samsung Galaxy Tab ($399-$599, 3.5 stars). Nonetheless, if you are looking for a full-color reading experience that makes the most of graphic media like magazines and children's books, the Nook Color delivers. And that makes it our Editors' Choice for color ebook readers.

Design and Features
The Nook Color doesn't use monochrome E-Ink for its reading screen, like the Amazon Kindle 3G + Wi-Fi ($189, 4 stars) or the original Barnes and Nobles Nook ($199, 4 stars). Instead, it has a 7-inch, 1024-by-600-pixel LCD that can show 16 million colors. The biggest upside of the LCD, of course, is color and contrast that blows E-Ink away. Also, because the LCD screen is backlit, you can read it without a light. The screen is also touch sensitive, so you can navigate menus and turn pages with a swipe of your finger. And not only can the display show graphics and photos, but it can also play video.

But there are downsides as well. The most significant is the battery life—Barnes & Noble rates the battery life at "up to 8 hours." Pretty weak compared with the weeks of use you can get out of one charge with most E-Ink-based ebook readers. The screen is also more reflective than E-Ink displays, although I was able to read the Nook Color outside in broad daylight without much trouble. Finally, as anyone who works in front of a computer knows, LCDs can cause eyestrain. Indeed, at maximum brightness the screen did hurt my eyes, but the brightness control is easy enough to adjust. In most reading environments, I found turning the brightness down to about 25 percent was about right. At maximum brightness, the Nook Color is literally a flashlight.

At 8.1 by 5 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and nearly a pound (15.8 ounces), the Nook Color is both bigger and heavier than the Kindle or the original Nook. Unlike the plastic wafer feel of traditional e-readers, the Nook Color feels like the slab of aluminum and glass that it is. It's still light enough to tote easily, though, and I was able to comfortably use the Nook Color with one hand, which really isn't possible for long periods with the 1.5-pound Apple iPad.

The basic, gunmetal gray design with black soft-touch back panel is accented by a small, triangular cutout in the lower left hand corner. This is just a design element, although it does help conceal the micro-SD slot. The Nook Color comes with 8GB of memory, enough for about 6,000 books, newspapers, or magazines—though the latter two take up more space because of their photos. With a micro SD card you can expand the storage up to 40GB (up to 32GB cards are accepted), which is far more space than you're likely to fill with books.

A Touch-Sensitive Reading Interface
The Nook Color comes with few physical buttons: just Volume controls on the right panel, a Power button on the left, and the "N" logo below the screen that serves as your Home button. All other navigation comes via the touch screen. Tap the bottom of the display, and a software menu pops up with Library, Shop, Search, Extras, Web, and Settings. The Library is the main repository of all your books, magazines, and newspapers. Shop sends you to the Barnes & Noble Store, but you have to be connected to a Wi-Fi network to get there—the Nook Color lacks 3G connectivity. Search will not only catalog all the titles on your Nook, but also search online bookstores and the Web. Extras is the holding place for applications like Contacts, LendMe, Pandora, and other Android Apps that Barnes & Noble will port to the Nook Color. Wherever you go on the Nook's menus there is always an on-screen icon that instantly takes you back to the last book or magazine you were reading, which is a nice touch.

Reading on the Nook Color is very intuitive. You can move forward or back in books by swiping the screen or tapping, and the display is pretty responsive. Rapidly flipping through pages is possible in a way that would be unthinkable on E-Ink displays. You can adjust the text size and typeface, but perhaps most importantly, you can adjust the brightness while you are reading. If you are like me, you will do this pretty often, and usually to turn the brightness down.

The combination of the color display and touch screen give you more options for managing your books. You can drag books onto your desktop and arrange them into piles so you can access them without going into your library at all. Inside your library, you can create shelves of books according to your taste, perhaps grouping all your cookbooks together, or all of your Steven King novels. This kind of organizational flexibility makes it a lot easier to find books than on the Kindle.

The Nook Color lets you load and read personal files as well. In addition to PDF and ePub files, the Nook supports JPG, PNG, GIF and BMP files. You can also view Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. The device supports MP4 video, although the company says it will be a few months before video-enhanced content becomes available for the Nook Color. Think cookbooks with instructional videos, as opposed to a pure YouTube client—though you can watch YouTube videos through the Web browser.

Social Reading and the Bookstore
The Nook Color lets you share recommendations, quotes, and even entire books with your friends. Connect the device to your Twitter and/or Facebook accounts, and you can clip passages from within books and post them to the Web. With a few clicks I was able to tell the world: "I've read 1 percent of Decision Points by George W. Bush." Barnes & Noble's LendMe application lets you share digital books. Loan a book to a fellow Nook user and they will be able to read it for two weeks. During that time it will be unavailable to you, but after two weeks it will reappear in your library. Not all books can be lent out, and of course, they can only be lent Nook owners. Anybody want to borrow my digital copy of Decision Points?

The Barnes & Noble Ebook Store has more than 2 million books, including 194 of the 205 current New York Times bestsellers. The company signed up a host of newspapers and magazine providers, including The Times, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire, National Geographic, and most importantly, PC Magazine. Magazines come through with the layout and images intact. You can read them as a full page or in article view, which re-flows an individual story into a more readable template. It isn't as flashy as some of the iPad magazines out there, but it is an enjoyable experience and dead simple for publishers to support.

Android Apps and Web Browsing
The Nook Color runs a version of Android 2.1, but does that mean it supports Android apps? Yes and no. The Nook Color does not access the Android marketplace directly, but Barnes and Noble ports some Android apps to the platform. The company has a few games, Chess and Crosswords, as well as Pandora Internet radio pre-loaded in the Extras section. That said, the company plans to keep these apps in the Extras section and keep the Nook Color focused on reading.

The Nook Color's Web browser, on the other hand, is a little more than an "Extra." Although not quite a full version of Chrome, it will get you online fast and the browsing experience isn't bad. There are some quirks—like tapping to zoom in on a page, instead of the more intuitive pinch-and-zoom functionality. Still, when you are using the browser, it's easy to think you are holding a tablet and not an ebook reader.

Battery Life and Conclusions
Testing battery life for ebook readers is usually pretty difficult. The Amazon Kindle will run for a week with its 3G radio on, and as long as a month with it disabled. That is certainly not the case with the Nook Color. The company says it will last up to 8 hours, and my testing confirmed that number. After a day of heavy reading, about 3-4 hours, I went to bed to find the device dead in the morning. The next day, I got the Nook Color to survive the night by turning off Wi-Fi. If you read for more than a few hours a day, you should plan on charging daily. This is much better than the color-screened Sharper Image Literati's ($159, 2.5 stars) measly 4-hours of battery life.

Make sure you bring your charger wherever you go. Although the Nook Color looks like it has a standard micro USB port, it will only charge with the Nook AC adapter. I tried both 5V and 10V adapters, with no luck. Nor can you charge the device by connecting it to a PC. Turns out the cable that comes with the Nook Color has a few extra pins in it, to enable faster charging. The custom connector supports 2000mAh charging, whereas most mobile electronics use 500mAh chargers. This is limiting, since it significantly reduces your charging options, but it isn't much different than the proprietary charger that's required with the iPad.

With the original Nook and Kindle selling for just under $200 each (less than $150 each if you forgo 3G) and the Apple iPad starting at $500, the $250 Nook Color occupies a place right in the middle. As long as you don't expect full tablet functionality, and you keep your Barnes & Noble-approved AC adapter handy, the Nook Color makes a perfectly amiable reading companion if you want to see your books in full color.

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