Hanvon color e-Ink display at CES2011
And just as we were getting comfortable with the Kindle Touch, here comes a rumor that Amazon is getting set to produce color e-Ink devices sometime this year.
In 2009, there was speculation about a color e-Ink Kindle in the offing while the first generation Kindle stock started dwindling to nothing. It was shot down by Bezos himself saying that he had seen the mockups and they weren’t pretty. He went on to say that a color e-Ink Kindle was “multiple years” away. This is 2012 and not, by any stretch of the imagination, “multiple” years … a mere 3. Could Bezos have been a little pessimistic about how soon the tech industry pulls up its socks?
As a gadget geek, I am intrigued with what a color e-Ink screen is likely to look like. The image in the linked article may or may not be an example image of a color e-Ink screen, there is no credit for the image so there is no way to tell for sure. However, I [ more ]
Having just received our “office” Nook, I am still in geek-mode noting the differences between the two devices.
One of the things that struck me when I first connected the Nook to the computer was the directory structure is completely different from the Kindle’s structure.
The Kindle’s folder structure looks like this on my iMac:
Kindle Directory Structure
For me, as a long-time Kindle user, the directory structure is intuitive. The “audible” directory is where audio-books are, the “documents” directory is the main directory for eBooks, the “music” directory is where we can put music to listen to while we read and the “tts” directory is an obscure system folder with system specific items inside – a directory we dare not venture into or alter in anyway. It just doesn’t concern us.
I won’t show you the contents of my “documents” folder, because from experience, it can look like chaos. Essentially, all you will see in this directory is files with a “.mobi” or “.azw” extension plus additional directories or files with the same name as the book. For example, [ more ]
Let me start this post out by stating that I am a long-time Kindle owner and lover. If I seem to be favouring the Kindle over the Nook, this is the reason: I have had far more experience with the Kindle than I have with the Nook and I have been spoiled by the Amazon and Kindle experience. That said, let’s get on with my experience thus far.
Look and Feel
My first impressions of the Nook as I extracted the box from the shipping packaging was that the Kindle comes shipped in its ‘own box’ because the box itself is sturdy enough. The Nook packaging is flimsy. I can see how it would be easy to destroy in transit. I wonder if it might not be cheaper to package the Nook in its own shipment-sturdy box from the start.
Out of the box, the Nook was completely devoid of charge. I had to charge it for a good half hour before I was able to turn it on. As a gadget-geek, I like when my new gadgets come out of the box [ more ]