Leveling Down

The Nook Color is a fully functional Android tablet for $250. Can it replace a portable console?

I haven’t been playing too many games lately, so this week I want to blog about my newest purchase: the Nook Color. Like any major purchase these days, I need to run this thing past my wife, but with my birthday coming up I asked to buy it for my birthday since I had planned to get a tablet at some point. The recent $199 sale combined with the fact that the Nook Color can be fully rooted to be an unlocked Android-based tablet piqued my interest enough to get me to purchase it. Plus, as an Android-based tablet, it can sort of play games like Angry Birds, so I will share my initial thoughts on both the tablet and Angry Birds in today’s entry.

Features I Wanted for the Right Price Point
Contrary to how it may seem, buying a tablet was not an impulse purchase for me. I had already told my wife early on that I did want a tablet at some point when the right features came packed in a tablet at the right price point. I was not interested in the Apple $500 iPad (price and not being an Apple fan), and was excited about the Android-based Motorola Xoom until I found out it was $800. Even at the $250 retail price, I was planning on asking to get the Barnes & Noble Nook Color for my birthday in a couple weeks. The $200 sale just made me ask for it sooner!

So what kind of features was I looking for? First off, I have a pretty extensive digital manga collection. I wanted to get to reading them at some point, and even wanted a digital reader for comics. I’d like to go read several of the more popular Batman trade paperbacks, for example. The 7” Nook Color is the perfect size for reading manga, and comic books don’t do too badly either.

An additional feature I desired was the ability to watch video. Now when I’m traveling, I can just whip out my tablet to watch something rather than power up a laptop. The Nook Color natively plays .mp4 files flawlessly. However, it chokes a bit on .avi files. I found one application that does a decent job with .avi files, so I’m going with that for now. I am hopeful that in the future developers will find a way to get the hardware to handle the popular XviD codec.

The final thing I wanted out a tablet was the ability to read ebooks and PDF files – pretty much the main reason a normal user would buy the Nook Color for. Now I can read digital versions of books and magazines, but to be honest, larger magazines don’t work so well since you need to zoom in a lot and it just doesn’t feel as good as holding a real magazine.

Additional Noteworthy Features
Besides the primary features I cared about above, a rooted Nook Color has several other things going for it. From a hardware standpoint, it has a micro SD slot that is capable of allowing 32 GB more space in addition to the free 5 GB already on the tablet itself. It sports an 8-10 hour battery life, even with Wi-Fi on. It doesn’t have any 3G or phone support of any type – only wireless. It lacks cameras and any other fancy features that you’d pay several hundred more dollars for. What it does have that many cheap tablets don’t is a capacitive touch screen. This is one of the biggest marvels that the hardware has going for it, since it allows for pinch-to-zoom functionality.

Then there’s the additional stuff that I don’t care as much for: games, Internet browsing, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I’m not really going to use my tablet to play games when I have better ones on dedicated home and portable consoles. The Internet browsing and social media type stuff could be useful if I was traveling a lot and had access to wireless wherever I went, but in the home and on the subway, there’s no point – I’d be on my PC at home for Internet use and there’s no wireless on my subway.

Initial Impressions
I thought that this tablet would be completely awesome, but it turned out to just be pretty good. Manga and comics are great, but I’m not quite happy with the video support. And just general usability of the device isn’t as impressive as I was expecting it to be.

The biggest shocker was that after I rooted it, I didn’t know what to do next. I’m completely new to the Android operating system, and didn’t really quite realize that everything you want to be able to do with a device you need to find an app for it. I wanted to read manga and comics, so I need to sort through the various apps to find the best one. I wanted to watch .avi files, so I had to find one that worked. PDF viewer?  Had to download that as well. Even the way I wanted to organize my apps, called a “launcher” had to be researched and downloaded. Basically, it was VERY hands-on in terms of figuring out how to customize my tablet for what I needed to do. I consider myself a power user, but found it sort of jarring that there was no inherent operating system that handled all the features I took for granted on normal computers.  I frequently found myself searching online for what Android applications other users were saying they were using. I basically felt lost in the dark!

I also still don’t really know how to change various settings for the device nor how this whole touch-screen navigation works. Each application has different areas or gestures that I’m supposed to sort of figure out in order to turn pages, open a new document, zoom in and zoom out – it can be pretty annoying. What’s definitely frustrating at some level as well is that the Nook Color has no real buttons besides one Home button. Android-based devices usually have more than just a Home button – for example, they typically have a Back button. Imagine how limiting using this Android operating system can feel if you can’t go back a screen or back out of options settings, etc. Still, I am getting the hang of it more, and am starting to finally have it set up to how I want it. But now what?

The Cost
Perhaps it’s no surprise to readers of this site who are our age, but even with the great price I bought my Nook Color for, it isn’t really the prohibitive element here. As usual, it’s time. I’m excited now that I can take this Nook Color with me on the subway or when my wife is shopping or even read it before bed, but I have to give up something else to use it instead: games. I pretty much give up playing my PSP or DS in order to mess around with my Nook Color during those times. It’s all now a juggling act in terms of what I want to devote my precious free time to. I can’t believe how valuable time is now when I have so many things I want to do, but so little time to do them!

Take down those pesky pigs with some birds and a slingshot in Angry Birds.

Angry Birds
I’ll close out by giving some quick impressions about the Angry Birds game that everyone is talking about. I think it’s great for a free game. I showed it to my wife, and she thoroughly enjoyed its simplistic gameplay element wrapped in a cutesy shell. You’re basically using your finger to adjust the trajectory and power of a bird-like ball hurled by a slingshot to knock over pig-like balls around different structures that can be broken down by the bird ball. My wife loved the aesthetics and intuitive gameplay of it while I was slightly intrigued with the physics of it all. It’s honestly a great way to warm someone up to a tablet, not to mention the fact that the game is free. Of course, it still isn’t going to take the valuable time I’d rather spend on better games that I am willing to pay for, but it’s good for the casual or non-gamer.

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