Barnes and Noble Reveals Nook Color

Barnes and Noble Reveals Nook Color

Nachiket Mhatre, Oct 27, 2010 1130 hrs IST

Brings a 7-inch color screen with a secondary marketless Android OS, plus a magazine reader

The rumors about a color avatar of the Barn and Noble's own reader Nook have turned out to be true; even down to the $250 (Rs 11,200 approx.) price tag. The most noteworthy is the inclusion of Android, albeit without the Android Market, slotting it somewhere between a plain-vanilla ebook reader and a full fledged tablet.

In addition to regular ebook content, 7-inch Vivid View color LCD screen sourced from LG will also provide access to social networking apps like Facebook and Twitter, in addition to video playback. Other Android enabled goodies include Pandora radio, games, Google and Wikipedia, and a contact manager. Barnes and Noble plan to give the Nook Color a social networking spin by introducing Nook Friends, which allows sharing of quotes and even entire books. The Nook Color also packs in a magazine reader, which will include a huge collection of magazines, which may just turn out to be one of its strongest USP.

The design is clean and minimalist with no physical buttons found on its body proportioned at 8.1 x 5.0 and just half an inch thick. The UI is driven by a touch screen with a resolution of 1024 600, which is laminated to reduce glare. Storage is taken care of by a microSD card slot. Internet connectivity is through Wi-Fi. It weighs in at 15.6 ounces, which is 5.4 ounces heavier and $100 (Rs 4,500 approx.) dearer than the new Kindle, but it does pack in a lot more.

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Nook Color Nook Barn and Noble ebook reader

Discussion Board

(4) Comments

interds

,New York, on Oct 29, 2010 07:47 AM

The Nook Color will not run apps straight out of the Android Market, but that does not mean it cannot run them. In fact, they have done a lot of tests on apps from standard Android smartphones and they pretty much run on Nook Color, which has Android 2.1 under the hood. (The Nook native interface and apps are just standard Android application layers.) Barnes & Noble special Nook SDK runs on top of the standard Android one and gives developers access to exclusive extensions and APIs for the Nook and its interface. So porting Android apps is not difficult. B&N says it is more like optimising them for Nook than porting them. Nook Color screen is supposed to be better (less reflective) for reading than iPad.