Barnes & Noble Nook E-Reader Reviewed, Yawns Abound

We've seen the Barnes & Noble Nook in the news quite a bit lately -- and not necessarily for the right reasons, either, after its pre-holiday release was postponed to a decidedly post-holiday January 11th. A few lucky pre-orderers will get their Nooks today, but very few have had enough time with the gadgets to write reviews. The results? Positive, but not exactly a perfect machine.

While Engadget praises the inclusion of free texts from Google Books and the overall polish of the buying experience, our sister site also ran into a number of issues with applications crashing, and found performance generally lackluster. Technologizer encountered similar issues, finding the hardware good but the software not quite ready for prime-time. That sentiment was echoed by Gizmodo, which noted that, beyond the software issues, the reading experience is exactly like that of the Kindle -- not surprising, since the gadgets have the same screen.

So, the verdict? Is the Nook a Kindle-killer? It seems the answer is that, with significant software upgrades, the Nook has the potential to be. But as of now, it isn't. The smart thing to do would be to wait for a few updates to roll through, see just how polished this thing gets, and then re-visit the comparison to answer which wins. But, right now, it's hard to see a clear advantage. [From: Engadget, Technologizer, Gizmodo]

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