Hands On With the New Nook

Barnes & Noble today in New York, and I was able to get some hands-on time with the device, though this "hands-on" time consisted mostly of watching a company rep flip pages and show off the Nook's new features while I, and a crowd of other reporters, took notes.

The device comes with a touch display, super compact design, two months of battery life, and may even hold a solution to that annoying screen flash found on all E Ink displays. Although, officially, no press were supposed to touch the device, I managed to get a few fingers on its rubberized exterior. And it feels like the has some real competition coming.

At 6.5 by 5 by 0.5 inches, the Nook is much more compact that previous editions; it almost feels like the . The matte black device has a sculpted back that makes it easier to hold in one hand. The entire face of the device is taken up by a 6-inch touch screen and the Nook button. Almost all navigation is done using the touch screen and the single Nook home button. By comparison, the Kindle 3 has 38 buttons, including a full QWERTY keyboard.

The touch screen uses infrared technology to detect your finger and seemed fairly responsive, although I wasn't allowed to actually touch it. It supports 16 levels of grey and seemed as sharp as any other E Ink display that uses the latest Pearl technology. The screen is sharper than, for example, the , which was distinctly opaque.

I should note the small, color, touch-based icons that were at the bottom of the original Nook's display are gone. I never hated these buttons the way a lot of reviewers did, but the touch screen is definitely more intuitive. It will help with battery life as well.

The home screen is another area that differentiates the Nook from the Kindle. The Kindle shows you the list of books on the device; the Nook shows you the book you are reading, your most recent downloads, and recommendations for further reading. This new Nook will also include Nook Friends, an array of social hooks to Twitter, Facebook, and fellow Nook owners' collections that let you quote text, make recommendations, and even share books.

The Nook runs Android 2.1, but it doesn't look anything like Android and it doesn't run apps. If you want that experience, you will have to go with the Nook Color, which Barnes and Noble is touting as the "best-selling Android Tablet" in the country; albeit, one without an Android marketplace.

The device runs an 800MHz TI OMAP 3 processor and has 2GB of on-board storage, enough for about 1,000 books. Pop in a microSD card and you can store up to 32GB worth of books. Of course, the device can also access your cloud-based library via Wi-Fi. The new Nook is Wi-Fi only, which makes sense for an entry-level reader. No 3G version is planned.

The company claims the battery will last up to two months with Wi-Fi turned off, or twice as long as the Kindle. Obviously, I couldn't test this today.

Perhaps the most exciting new feature in the Nook is that it decreases the screen flashes that have cursed E Ink displays since their inception. Turning the page has always required an obnoxious screen flash; you get used to it, but it definitely interrupts the reading process. Barnes & Noble claims that the Nook has proprietary technology that reduces these flashes by 80 percent. In my limited Nook-watching time, I still saw a fair amount of flashing, but I suspect I saw a pre-production unit. If Barnes & Noble can make good on that 80 percent, it would be a major differentiator.

At $139, the new Nook is poised to go right after the Kindle 3 in terms of pricing. But in the past, whenever Barnes & Noble has launched a new Nook or cut pricing, Amazon has matched them. We will need to get more time with the Nook before we can really compare it to the Kindle, but from what I have seen so far, this is a compelling product.

The new Nook is available for pre-order now and will be in retail stores by June 10.