Many of us were concerned that the lack of a software demonstration of the adam, and the limited photos were a sign of either a delay or a non existent delivery of the Notion Ink Adam tablet. Today, Notion Ink delivered a YouTube video to one of their critics, the AndroidPolice blog and it’s available for viewing now. It does NOT dissapoint. This tablet out of the box looks like a powerhouse.
Below you’ll notice the interface is a fresh overlay of android, called Eden and it is a “Panel Engine”. Many original elements in the interface look very exciting. Browsing through applications has a coverflow style gesture and some of the apps work in panel form splitting the screen. A multi-panel screen might be slid left to right or back to expose more panels and there’s a nice springy indication when the last panel is reached.
Book reading of PDF looks as you would expect and has a very responsive multi-touch zoom feature. Other notable features, a tab switch for browsing, a convenient appointment book plus calendar and calculator all in one, the original email app called Mail’d, a crisp mapping app. And not to be understated a wireless USB mouse was plugged in and a cursor was mobile instantly. The advantages of this for presentations are huge. A graphic app called Canvas looked very sketchable and responsive – the caption indicated that it was also an image editor with effects and layers. Wow!
Omitted from this video was image browing, video viewing and it’s hard to tell, but file browsing in the system didn’t really get touched on. Despite this, the important things were hit. The GUI works and looks to work very well. People who have preordered are not going to be disappointed with seeing this finally. I’d say it’s as magic as the iPad any day, with a few bonuses that certainly make it a cut above.
The Nook Color at Barne’s and Noble is definitely still in stock at the stores in case you’re looking to buy one for you or as a very generous holiday gift. It’s becoming pretty well known as a reader and tablet. The Nook Color is a reskinned Android device. Underneath the engine is Android, the hardware supports it, but what you get with the dedicated Barnes and Noble software is a little more limited. Does that matter? Not really. It’s a very capable device. It does more than you need it to out of the box.
What I really like
It’s a very clean device on the outside and inside. Navigation has a good feel for the most part. I’m mixed on the screen size personally. I like the mobility of 7″ screen device (which is the Nook) and I don’t think I’d want something heavier, but at the same time, I sort of want a little bigger picture as I’m staring at it. Part of it is getting used to it though. 7″ clearly works for a lot of people. The rubber backing and corner ring are a plus. The weight is very acceptable. Out of the box, I like that it has a nice browser and touch keyboard. It has folders for things you are storing. Somebody had tried to load a Mac .dmg file in the one I used, so I know it accepts downloads on the net and via USB cable. (Not sure what they were trying to achieve with a .dmg though.)
Searching for books is easy enough on the Nook store. Funny though, you know all the ebook stores boast the number of titles. 2 titles out of 3 that I searched for were not available. That was a bummer. I was looking for Thinking with Type, as it would have been a nice book to preview on the color screen.
A video file loaded in the device in the gallery played beautifully. It was a Nook commercial and it was stunning actually. I was confused by how well that played vs the motion on Youtube. You might first think it was just latency on the Wi-Fi, but I’m only partially agreeing with you there. So clearly there’s an embedded video player that works better than the on board Youtube player. But that was an optimized video so further testing is needed. I couldn’t even tell (because I was in the gallery) what file format that was.
The Nook color has a headphone jack and Pandora was one of the included apps. I also played a game of chess on it and lost horribly. Wow I am terrible these days.
I’ve focused on all these things, when the Nook Color is predominantly an ebook reader. Why? Because I truly think people will be using it for other things mostly. I think they will enjoy reading the books, but they will be more tempted to browse the web and just have fun. And I think that’s great. Because the things we own should support what we like to do.
Book reading was pleasant and it worked. Much of the utility functions while reading is accessed through a simple long press of the finger. I liked the slider to race across the book at the bottom to get to say the end of the book. As you slide it the page counter shows you where you are. I have to leave it there. See more below. As great as reading books are, it’s pretty much status quo for me these days.
Limitations & Minor Issues
The browsing experience isn’t say Android 2.2 so Flash is not installed. That doesn’t matter a whole lot because most pages look beautiful, but it does matter to me. The Android Market is not available, and the touch screen feedback might be suffering a bit, though that part is hard to tell because it’s possible the Nook I used had been on for weeks straight and just needs a reboot. I know that the Nook supports at least 2-finger touch, but browsing does not. There are zoom buttons to handle that. Once you’ve used the double-press to zoom to paragraph on webpages on Android phones, it’s hard to not have that anymore. Nook needs it.
The gallery with Photos was a small problem. It definitely displayed a gallery of photos, that was great. I wish I knew if this was related to the state of the Nook, needing a reboot, but I didn’t like browsing the gallery as much as my Nexus One Android phone. The first iPhones were also so smooth as compared to this Nook Color. If you have an iPhone, you might be a little bummed.
The photos didn’t appear to be large at all. 2-finger pinch didn’t work all that well on it.
Back to reading books. It was a little boring for me to be honest . I had a little trouble finding the text-size menu at first, but I finally got the type and margins the way I liked. I’d like to see an animated page flip. It’s stupid but I actually like having some sort of transition. Doesn’t have to be 3D though. If I was designing the page flip transition, I might actually experiment with it a little more to test what readers like. Till now, they’ve all been kind of artificial and repetitive but I think there’s room for testing and maybe even mixing up the animations, with some random motion. I’d even experiment with randomizing the paper shades. give it an earthy feel. One page being a little more sepia than the next. (I mean subtly here not distracting, but interesting.)
Bookmarking was easy, just press the top right corner and a little flag appears. Oddly, the bookmark persists for multiple pages. I understand if it’s bookmarking based on the real books page, BUT that doesn’t do me any good really. I’m starting to think that a highlight bookmark is really the best way to go with these kinds of devices. Speaking of highlighting, I was annoyed that you could only highlight a word. I wanted to be able to drag a highlight across a paragraph at least.
Let me sum up book reading. Works fine, BUT they haven’t introduced anything new or inventive and that’s too bad. I think they need to be designing the next Nook update and getting on that, so it can be an OTA upgrade. They are at an advantage over phones with Android because all the Nooks are exactly the same.
The original Nook, I ended up taking a crack at again too. I love the way the epaper screens looks and I like the idea of it, fast navigation on the mini screen, with easy-on-the-eyes reading, but the Nook Color has really overshadowed it’s older brother at this point.
What I didn’t cover
There is a lot of information at the Nook website on specs and what it can do. This is a review of my impressions, but at the store I only had so much to go on. I want to put this thing through a lot of tests. I didn’t get to test various video formats to test playback performance, as well as the gallery browsing with my own personal pictures. Importantly I didn’t get to try PDFs or text files on it.
What about buying it? Do I recommend?
I absolutely recommend buying Nook Color. Reviews are difficult because you want to tall about nuances in order to satisfy the little feelings of something you experienced. But at the same time, this is a very cool tablet / reader. Barnes and Noble have really done well in their creation or partnership to make this. I think it suits a lot of people and I think you can exploit it for a lot more than a reader. I stand by what I wrote earlier in that, it is a hit because of the fact that it’s not necessarily trying to be everything, but it does do a lot.
The price is a good reason to buy the Nook Color. At $250 USD, it sure it’s close to the cost of a Netbook, but it’s also a large touch screen. Device specs in terms of processor and RAM aren’t too far off the iPad And we now know that it’s possible to “root” the device, basically hacking it so stock Android can be loaded. This might improve the experience for some or just be a necessity for others. (Hacking a Nook will void the warranty and you can break stuff. Use caution and done do it if you’re not comfortable with the risks.) So both a casual reader AND a tech hacker can make use out of this device.
I think that the price fits. It’s a good gift, as it’s less than an iPad, but offers what you need as a book reader. It’s easier to carry than a Netbook, lighter and simpler to deal with. Battery life, I’m told is rated at 9 hours of use, but apparently it is really low consumption in sleep mode. A shopper told me that hers was in sleep for a week and turned back on was still at 92%.
For the future
I’m going to be generous and say that the Nook color is just fine on it’s own. But I’m also going to say, they better not stop. They need to continue to develop and offer an upgrade. Photo browsing needs improvement. Rotation and touchscreen can be better. I also think they can maybe add more to make owners continue to use it. They actually already are doing that. They have a Nook developer program to make Nook Extras. This is basically it’s own Android Market. It’s exciting and it means that you can extend the device. Just like the iPad is set hardware this makes developers will have an easier time than they would with 50 handsets to deal with.
Bundles – Time for Barnes and Noble to jump into bundling. I’ve said this before. Buying a book for 11.99 isn’t that great of a deal when you can get the real book for that price. But when you bundle, you maybe can offer 3 genre ebooks for the price of 1. Publishers own so many titles that bundling is a natural direction. They introduce new titles, they add a ton of value. They promote things that might otherwise be overlooked. And frankly they probably are what is needed to bridge the price gap for a lot of people. 3 ebooks for 10 makes more sense than just 1.
They need to create a page transition for book reading, add full paragraph highlight and experiment with adding new features to ebook reading, see what people are testing. I also think the add-ons for sharing inside a book are a good idea. Let me give you an example. The Google Nexus One is great for sharing across apps. In Seesmic reading Twitter, I can click, hold and share through a bit list of apps I’ve added on. When I”m in a book, I want to share a pargraph, it needs to highlight, share, tweet, and then pass the truncated quote with a short URL linkin to the book on the bookstore. It might be shared on Twitter, Email, Facebook, a blog, whatever app is loaded. The standard apps are important for sure.
And the nice thing is they already have a short URL to start with… How about Nook.com/b/shortlink. On the social networks, people can see the quote, it’s referenced back to the Nook store. And how about this. Pass the original nook owner an affiliate discount on their next books if people who linked back from that quote actually buy it.
As I’ve known for a while and have been trying to share, the Pixel Qi screen is the right solution for most of these tablet devices right now. Look at this outdoor view. Pixel Qi IS in monochrome in the e-reader mode (reflective) but it’s very clear crisp and much better for looking at content. Kind of gives the movie an interesting tone, with a metallic sheen.
Charbax over at ArmDevices.net comes through with the video.
Posted: May 27th, 2010 | Author:Mike Smick | Filed under:ARM, Tablets | Comments Off
Here’s an interesting device. Looks a lot like the HP Slate that was demonstrated at CES. This Shogo Tablet is coming out in August of 2010 with a per unit price of $500 with a 5 and 10 quantity discount. It runs an embedded Linux (Angstrom) and has 10″ capacitive touch screen. This device has an open SDK development platform and Realease will work with other companies if for example, they want to create a custom tablet based on the core specs. You can get it with a few features stripped out or downgraded to bring the price down. You really have to get this kind of device in your hands to be able to know if it feels and reacts according to the speed you want. But from the look and video, it seems to be snappy with a decent 8 hour battery life and sporting features that many might have wanted in the Apple iPad.
The real insights on this Shogo Tablet from Realease are found in this Youtube video from Charbax. He’s reported the story on his excellent site: Armdevices. The best, he calls the foldable foot on the tablet a kickstand.
