(Illustration by Jenny Mörtsell)

Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/04/opinion/04opchart.html

A Two-Horse Race

It's a relief to finally lay hands on the Nook. The dual-screen reader was just a prop at its unveiling so I'm happy to report it works (pretty) well. It can't kill Kindle yet, but it's an alternative worth considering.

Do this now: Disregard all other ebook readers on the market besides Nook and Kindle. Unless you plan to get all of your books from back-alley torrents, or stick to self-published and out-of-copyright PDFs, you are going to need a reader with a good content-delivery system, one it connects to directly via wide-area network. And as long as you’re set on e-ink as your preferred means of digital reading—and it’s still the choice that’s easiest on the eyes and the battery—you’re going to need a reader that isn’t crapped up with gimmicks that supposedly compensate for the slow display.

But more on the Nook. The thing that makes it special is its two screens: one e-ink for reading books, one touch LCD for navigating and buying books on. More on that later, but basically, the setup works better than the single screen setups on the competition. Sonymessed up by putting a glare-inducing film over its screen to provide questionably beneficial touch controls; iRex avoided that, but made a “touch” interface that requires a stylus. Kindle plays it straight, developing a user interface that works well enough with physical buttons and e-ink (as long as you don’t use the “experimental” browser). Nook preserves the same pleasurable reading experience, but tucks in the capacitive-touch LCD screen for added control. In its 1.0 implementation, Nook is not as fast or as smooth as it should be, but already it’s showing that the second screen is not a gimmick.

Read on: http://gizmodo.com/5420216/barnes–noble-nook-review-pretty-damn-good?skyline=true&s=i