Nook vs. Kindle 2: first impressions

I had a chance today to play with both Kindle 2 and Nook for less than 5 minutes and I was really surprised to find that I didn’t like Nook at all. I thought Kindle 2 was too big, but Nook while smaller feels super heavy like it’s made out of lead.  Nook has a cool LCD screen on the bottom that not just a gimmick showing book covers in colors but also works as a touch keyboard, while Amazon’s Kindle 2 has a huge keyboard below the screen that I think is a waste of space. Both have 3G network connectivity, and Nook’s DRM doesn’t seem as horrible as Kindle’s.  However there’s a huge advantage that Kindle has over Nook and it’s screen refresh rate.  Turning pages on Kindle is almost seamless, while on Nook it takes much much longer. Both cost about the same but after handling Kindle 2 I would never get a Nook.  Well to be fair I won’t get any of the two… Perfectly happy with my iTouch as a pocket book reader 🙂

Tags: amazon, books, computers, ebooks, electronics, kindle, nook