I never thought I'd be this in love with gadgets. I never even had a cellphone until my 3rd year in college. I was an artist and I used to love creating with my hands more than relying on electronic devices. Case in point, I submitted my freshman Com 2 term paper, typewritten. I knew how to use Microsoft Office by then but I preferred the feel of a typewriter. You get what I mean?
Anyway, enough with the introduction. I've decided to document my ongoing love fest with electronics to help people. I will start blogging about my gadgets. Nice, right?
I'm starting with eBook readers. There are a lot of eBook readers around so I had to shop around before buying mine. I looked at all the readers and scrutinized their features for weeks before settling on my top 2: the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook.
Nook vs. Kindle
Since I read at least 3 hours a day during workdays and about 5-6 hours on weekends, I needed a reader that's forgiving on the eyes. A full-color backlit touchscreen LCD might look über cool but try reading for 3 straight hours and you'll end up with a massive headache. That's the reason why I never wanted the iPad. What I needed was an E Ink reader.
I actually bought the Kindle but decided to return it because I realized that the Nook was a much better fit for me and here's why.
The Kindle had a lot of wonderful features. It's the most affordable reader at $139. It's also the lightest ebook reader with the longest battery life. It can actually last for a whole month on a single charge! That's heaven for a heavy reader like me.
What made me decide on a Nook, however, was all the 'what ifs.' First example, the expandable memory. While Kindle has the higher internal memory, it is not expandable. The Nook is expandable up to 16 GB. This could turn out to be a useless feature seeing as a book in normal EPUB format is less than 1 MB. I haven't even used 10% of my Nook's 2 GB internal memory. Now, I might end up not even needing 16 GB of memory but it's good to know I can expand it if I needed to.
Another feature than sold me on the Nook is the replaceable battery. As most of us gadget savvy people know, a rechargeable battery will only last for 500 - 1000 charges. The Kindle's battery is not replaceable. If the battery runs out, we have to send it back to Amazon to have the internal battery replaced. The Nook has a detachable battery so I can just buy a replacement battery when the old one has run through its cycle and replace it myself. I'm sure I'd have moved on to an upgrade by then but it's good to know this is an option.
Of course, this could turn out to be another non-issue because the Kindle lasts one month on a single cycle compared to the Nook's 10 days, so if we're being conservative and base the battery life on just 500 cycles, the Kindle's internal battery could last 42 years whereas the Nook's battery will only last 14 years.
So why the Nook, you might ask? First of all, it reads a wider range of ebook formats like EPUB, PDB & PDF. Other book formats are also easily convertible to EPUB via a free software called Calibre. It also reads graphics formats like JPG, GIF, PNG & BMP. The Kindle only reads the Amazon proprietary ebook format AZW, MOBI & PDF (I must note that unconverted PDF files don't look great on either reader). For all other formats, you have to send the file to Amazon and they will convert it to AZW for free. This could turn out to be a hassle though, especially if you need to send them 500 books to convert.
Now here's the clincher. I didn't really choose the Nook over the Kindle because of it's great features because if I were being very honest, I could go either way. The best part about my Nook is, it looks so cool with its LCD touchscreen display!
If you're still undecided, here are the side-by-side specs to help you out:
I hope this helps you confused people out there. Please post comments or send me a personal message if you have any questions and I'll do my best to answer them.
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