US book store chain Barnes & Noble has brought out its next generation Nook ereader with a full 7 inch color VividView touch screen and WiFi N wireless access, priced at just $249. It’s not just a direct attack on Amazon’s Kindle range, but also tablets generally and Barnes & Noble is describing it as a social tablet which lets you lend your books and other content to friends, and borrow books from its stores. It will ship on November 19.
The store has also cut deals with Best Buy, Walmart and Books-A-Million starting in late November.
Barnes & Noble says that it now has 2 million ebooks available from its book store, and the device comes with 8GB of storage so you can keep about 6,000 Nookbooks (it calls its ebooks Nookbooks, how sweet). To put that another way this is 1,000 books, 25 full-color magazines, 10 newspapers, 50 kids’ books, 500 songs and 150 photos. The new Nook runs Android 2.1 operating system so it must also have access to Android Market.
Barnes & Noble has added its new Nookfriends technology, which keeps your book choices and opinions and notes available to friends via Facebook, Twitter and e-mail. Using WiFi you can also browse the internet on the new NookColor.
The addition of the color screen is what makes pictures and other content more appropriate. Both color and touch were promised this year by Amazon on its Kindle, but so far this has yet to be delivered. It also this week promised lending added to its Kindle system, so that you can lend a copy of any book to another Kindle owner, but while it is being borrowed, it cannot be read by the original owner. Kindle will have to have all of these capabilities delivered before the holiday season or Barnes & Noble will run away with US sales this year.
Nook will now deliver many newspapers in color from its Nooknewsstand service which has the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and USA Today on it, as well as Rolling Stone, Esquire, US Weekly, National Geographic, Martha Stewart Living, Cosmopolitan and Elle magazines.
The Nook continues to have its ‘read in store’ software so that you can go to a store and begin reading a book before you buy it, just like you would with physical books.
The new LendMe App enables Nookcolor users to view LendMe books in their friends’ digital libraries and request to borrow a title they’ve been meaning to read. Lending can happen via Facebook and Google Gmail.
The new Nookcolor has expandable memory using a microSD card and comes with a selection of extras including Pandora internet radio, chess and Soduku games, Crossword puzzles and video viewing gallery, though we’re not sure how you get video onto the thing yet.
There are also Nook apps on the iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and on Android smartphones, as well as Windows-based PCs, laptops or netbooks and the Nook can sync last page read, highlights, notes and bookmarks.
The new screen can show JPG, PNG, GIF and BMP files, use personal photos for wallpaper and view Microsoft Office files including Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
We’re not yet sure where the screen has come from but it has 1024 x 600 resolution, displays 16 million colors and a wide viewing angle. Some reports have it as an IPS (In Plan Switching) LCD screen, which would almost certainly mean it is made by LG Display or Hitachi. The fact that the device only holds an 8 hour charge seems to back this up, but this means that Kindle would win hands down for reading in sunlight, because it uses an e-ink screen. What an IPS screen has to do is de-power the screen backlight when you are reading to make it use less power and look like an e-ink screen. But the Kindle consistently sticks to e-ink which gives it about a two week battery life.
The new Nook device is just 8.1 inches long by 5 inches and 0.48 inches thick and weighs 15.8 ounces. The company says that it has already sold 1 million previous generation Nooks.