Barnes & Noble Nook HD Tablets Take on Amazon Kindle Fire, iPad

Barnes & Noble Nook HD Tablets Take on Amazon Kindle Fire, iPad, article.
Barnes & Noble announced a new line of tablet devices Tuesday that are poised to rival Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet line, the Google Nexus 7, and the widely expected iPad mini slated for later this year. The 7-inch Nook HD and 9-inch Nook HD+ feature an all-new design and start at US$199 and $269, respectively.

I am not sure what the raisin to be is for the customers of these, when we already have the iPad, the Kindle Fires, the Nexus, etc. Especially the first two have much more content to offer.
But competition is good for customers, and it seems they have done good with the hardware (very high screen resolution for example) and the pricing (actually beating the large Kindle Fire).
And they are very soon available in the UK too (via Dixon and PC World).

Inside the Paperwhite

A new promotional video explaining the light in the Kindle Paperwhite.



Quite promising. I think it'll be great, I'm looking forward to getting mine, hopefully within a week or two.

A little thing: isn't it beneath Amazon's dignity to so blatantly rip off Apple's style of promotional videos? I look at this, and it keeps hitting me in the face: Apple-Apple-Apple-Apple... Apart from being a rip-off, it must be counter-productive for a business to constantly remind their customers of their primary competition, no?

Tears of joy

And there shall be dancing in the streets!

The Kindle for iPad app finally has expanded text-size choices, which I've been begging on my weeping knees for, both here and to Amazon. The choices are, count 'em, doubled from six to twelve. Wunderbar!

And, further, there are now four fonts to choose from. Not a great number, but a big step up from one, and it includes two of the most important ones for screen reading: Georgia and Verdana. (They are most important for older devices without the modern super-high resolution of iPad 3, they were designed for readability on low resolution.)

We need pocket readers

Sony makes a pocket ereader, and Kobo makes a pocket ereader. Sadly they are both marginal players. I think both Apple and Amazon are missing a great market by ignoring the 5-inch form factor. Every time I read on my Galaxy Note, a 5.2-inch phone, I note how perfect it is as a reader. And it fits in most pockets. But it's expensive, because it's a fancy phone, not an ereader.

It doesn't seem Apple is interested in the ereader market, or in the 5-inch size. But I hope Amazon will make a 5-inch Kindle of the Paperwhite variety. The front-light and the new high-resolution screen will make a reader of this size highly readable for pure text.

Buff screen protector

[Thanks to Bert]

I don't know if Buff is so clear that fx the iPhone 5 will still look great if you put this stuff on both sides of it. But it's pretty amazing, how can something so thin absorb such shocks?

Listening vs reading

A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.

           -- Wilson Mizner

Sounds good, and a bit funny. But really, I beg to differ. If all you do is listen to people, mostly what you end up knowing is opinions and gossip. If you want to expand your knowledge and horizon, take to books.