Barnes and Noble announced their new Nook Tablet this week. A friend of mine mentioned to me soon after we saw the announcement that it has email which was a “glaring omission” from the Kindle Fire. That made me realize that the general view of the Kindle family is still very skewed and very misunderstood.
This can never be said too much – the Kindle Fire was never intended to be a general purpose tablet at all. The Kindle Fire is all about Amazon Prime content – not anything else. There was mention made of an app store of sorts for the Fire, but having not played with it yet, I can’t comment on the extent of the apps that will be available. The Amazon specific fork that runs on the Kindle Fire is restrictive which sounds like only certain apps will be allowed or available. That remains to be seen.
As with the Kindle Fire, the Nook Color is still a restricted Android adaptation which means that certain other apps will be allowed – inclusive of email and streaming from Netflix [ more ]
With all the noise about the eReader choices on the market now, how does one make the choice that suits their specific needs the best without getting hopelessly confused in all the technical terms and comparisons?
We here at Free-eBooks.net (and eBookEnvy.com), have decided to consider the four major name players – Kindle, Nook, Kobo and Sony – and give you our best bare-bones impressions of each. We considered the 4 models that had the most basic features in common as follows:
Nook (Barnes and Noble Nook)
Kindle (Amazon.com Kindle keyboard)
Kobo (Kobo touch)
Sony (Sony PRS-350)
What factors do you consider when buying?
For starters, when choosing an eReader, there are a few things you might want to consider:
Your current library formats (PDFs, ePUBs, Text, etc.)
Look and feel – your new eReader must feel like “home” in your hands – not heavy or awkward
Compatibility with all the eBook formats available
Price (of course – probably first and foremost)
Features
Readability settings (font sizes, spacing, etc.)
Let’s dive into these in more detail to [ more ]
With all this talk of eReaders, the Kindle Fire and it’s rivals and the iPad .. there isn’t a lot being said about those of us who read on our smartphones. I had a quick look at our statistics, and during a month, we get a few thousand mobile visits. And while I recognize that a portion of that number is quite possibly tablet related, there is no doubt an equal number are from smartphones as well.
The fact is that if you have a smartphone, it’s the one thing that goes with you just about everywhere you go. Almost as important as your wallet and your keys, the smartphone has become a fixture.
Personally, I have found myself with a spare minute here or there (at a doctor’s office, in line at the supermarket, waiting for the train to pass, etc.) where having a smartphone has proved a convenient time filler. Services that provide for cross-device syncing make this kind of reading even more convenient because you can read on your eReader at home and pick up on your smartphone when you’re [ more ]