Some Thoughts On The B&N Nook e-reader

I'm a big fan of portable devices. I strongly believe that they make our lives easier. In particular, is the allure of the e-reader. The ability to carry shelves and shelves of reading material with you, without the normally associated back strain, is a huge bonus.

So, it started about a year ago, when I started to look at various e-readers with the following in mind:

• readability indoors and outdoors
• capacity or expandable capacity
• battery life
• features and functionality
• programmability
• comfortable / ergonomics
• connectivity

I've seen the Sony e-readers and the Amazon Kindle. Both had great features that I really liked, but neither one really struck a chord with me. When B&N announced the Nook, I was immediately taken by the possibilities. Thanks to some foot dragging on my part, I ended up on the Feb 1st delivery date batch and got mine a little early, so I've had about a week to play with mine.

The Issues

First off, the Nook has 3 major issues, which has been discussed and talked about on the web:

• poor battery life ( not representative of the advertised battery life, though the advertisement has been amended slightly )
• very slow touch pad response
• lack of good pdf pan/zoom features. (reflow only does so much)

The firmware version I got with my Nook was 1.1.1, which addressed much of the issues regarding page turning speeds. I found that page turning on the Nook was perfectly fine, given that the e-ink display and controller is capable of 4 refreshes per second. I also found the quality of the display to be quite readable, provided one used a sufficiently dark color on the text that's being read. Light grey on slightly lighter grey reads like a faint photo copy.

Battery Life & Other Design Issues

I found the battery life issues to be very on the mark. With wifi turned on, I watched as the battery capacity fell like a rock, almost 1-3% of battery life per 2-3 minutes. That is... umm.. horrible. Contrast this against the Kindle which can easily go for 1 week without a recharge, with heavy usage.

After playing around with the Nook and disabling some features and enabling others, I've come to the following conclusion:

• The wireless b/g is a real power hog. A wireless N implementation would have used less energy. The ability to tune down the transmission power of the wifi module would have been welcome, as that would have allowed wifi usage without killing the battery in under 5 hours.
• The illuminated LCD touch screen display. If you have it active, it will likewise drain the battery quite rapidly. Not nearly as rapid as using the wifi, but still, a drain. There are times when you just want to navidate to a book, then your're done. There is no point in keeping the touchscreen on and lit when you are using the e-ink display. I would have happily gone with a tap-to-shift and have the menu show up as a popup on the e-ink display as that would have resulted in much less power usage.  A one button feature to disable the touchpad LCD display and light would be nice.
• Interval of various tasks. There appear to be tasks that wake up the Nook, when it's sleeping, causing a pretty heavy drain on the battery. These should be things you can disable or change the interval for, to reduce load on the battery life.

I also took the liberty of looking at the specifications of the ARM CPU that powers the Nook. There are various options in the CPU itself, which can power down the system or components of the system, to reduce power usage. From what I can tell of the Nook's behaviour, it looks like optimization was low on the totem pole for the device's performance, battery usage, and user interface design(see below regarding third party apps).

My recommendation to B&N's Nook engineers/developers:

• When one is reading a book or viewing other fairly static media, there is no need to keep the system powered up fully. I would re-rewite the browsing of e-ink texts in the following manner:
  • On opening a docment, pre-render pages and store them in memory.
  • On display of a page, power down touch pad and all radio features, letting the page turn buttons wake the system up.
  • On wake up for page turn, just read from memory, update e-ink display, and go back to sleep.
• I would also do away with the title and clock on the top of the display. No point in forcing the display to update every minute, just to show time, if you don't need to. It would also make the full 800x600 available for viewing content.
• Examine how the the Trook third party app does their touch-swipe interface. It is FAST, efficient, and responsive. iPod touch levesl of responsive. B&N should look at that and update their interface in that manner.
• Produce an SDK to the community as soon as possible. The third party apps is what makes using the Nook bearable!

Third Party Apps & Enhancements

Part of what makes the Nook appealing to me is the ability to load Android apps and see what works. In order to do that, you need to root your Nook. ( http://www.nookdevs.com )  I like the Soft-root method, as taking the Nook apart makes me queasy. :)

Here are the modifications I made to my Nook, which has GREATLY improved the usability of the Nook:

• SoftRoot - makes access available
• Busybox - adds some common utilities to the Nook
• NookBrowser - adds web browsing to the Nook (awesome, works great!)
• Trook - RSS reader and is a MUCH better/faster way to find free and open ebooks and load them onto your Nook.
• Alternative Launcher - Better customizations and allows adding items to the main menu
• 8GB micro-SDHC for storing extra content

Battery Life Preserving Configurations

To save on battery life, this is what I have configured:

• Airplane mode: ON  (disables cellular and wifi communication)
• 2% illumination on the touch screen
• 30 second sleep for the touch screen (10 seconds was just too short)

I'm half tempted to wite apps to basically implement the "kill power to all things until a keypress", so that the system won't be burning precious battery life while I'm reading an e-ink page that should be consuming no power.

Wish List For Nook

Here is my wish list for the Nook, things that would make Nook usage awesome:

• pan/zoom for PDF file viewing (multi-level zoom, panning via touch screen, jump to position via touch screen mini page)
• contrast/curve adjustment to darken up a document that's too light (Palm and Handspring had this...real life saver)
• RPG, turn based, adventure novel type games for the Nook ( Japanese DateSims and CG Novels are good candidates for this device ) (Old PC games like Lane Mastadon, or board games would likewise work. )
• enhanced or extra capacity battery for the Nook
• ability to add a USB keyboard. According to the ARM specs, the CPU supports OTG USB 2.0,where it can act as a USB host or USB client on a USB bus. A mini keyboard would be awesome. So would a USB aux display(the ARM6 can drive two 1024x768 8bit displays, it also supports SD/D1 mpeg4 and H.263/H.264 encoding and decoding, with TV output). The Nook ARM6 CPU has the capability to do this... we just need to unleash it.
• software support for performing a Nook backup over wifi via FTP/RSYNC/SCP/etc. (going to implement the automatic backup as the Nook's Android environment has the capability to do it now, just need to script/program it in)

Conclusion

The Nook has ALOT of potential. I'm looking forward to seeing that potential unleashed. This is something that B&N can really step up and support the community on, and turn their Nook into a platform for game, content, and application developers. 

No, the battery life is worse than the Kindle. It can't do video and isn't super sexy like the iPad. However, the Nook is a beautiful device in its own right and has alot of potential, and because of that, I will keep my Nook and grow its functionality, in hopes that B&N and the community works together to ensure that the current Nook, as well as future Nook(s) will be open and expandable, increasing their value, which in turn, helps B&N differentiate itself from all of the other e-readers out there.