Nook Review: Day 4 (PDF support, No RSS Feeds)

First, I’d like to point out that I was able to figure out how to use the Nook keypad: you need to use your forefinger, not your thumbs. This will feel a bit foreign to people who are used to texting or using both hands to type on a keyboard, but it does seem to work fairly reliably. I still don’t like this style of keypad–it’s very difficult to see the letter I’m tapping if I’m using a finger rather than a stylus.

The battery life on my Nook seems to be close to what is claimed by Barnes & Noble. Currently, after 4 full days after taking the Nook off the charger, with sporadic use and powering it off when not in use, I have 42% of my battery life left. I expect to need to recharge it in another 2 days at this rate.

Wanting to try a few of the features, I tried attaching the Nook to my netbook and copying over a few PDF files that were handy. The files happened to be a couple of school project reports and a copy of my resume (I was curious how the Nook would handle a resume format).

Nook appears to do its own word wrapping in a PDF, as well as honoring the word wrapping in the document itself. This caused some strange-looking lines, something like:

This is a paragraph as it might appear inside
a PDF. You’ll notice that there is some
wrapping handled by the Nook and other
word wrapping by the file.

This is a paragraph as it might appear
inside
a PDF. You’ll notice that there is some
wrapping handled by the Nook and
other
word wrapping by the file.

If you ever want to send your resume or manuscript to an ebook, be aware that you’ll likely need to do some special formatting to make it appear correctly (at least in the PDF format).

The next thing I wanted to try was subscribing to an RSS feed. This is a feature many Kindle users have told me about, so I assumed that the Nook would be able to do so as well. I quickly found out through Barnes & Noble’s FAQs that the Nook does not support adding your own RSS feeds (though you can read whatever Barnes & Noble allows through their RSS feed). That’s certainly another irritation–I would find that to be a valuable feature.

On the more positive side, I am pleased with having several free ebooks to choose from, but from what I can tell, there are not “thousands” available, as Barnes & Noble claims, but only a few dozen in their store. However, this includes classics that I’ve been meaning to read, like War & Peace, Wuthering Heights, and Pride & Prejudice.

I am finding myself reading much more often, and being able to download free samples of books while I’m on the go is also a good benefit. We’ll see if this continues as time goes on.

I’m still sticking with my overall grade of B+ for my impressions so far. I will probably provide another update in a few days.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 4:37 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.