It is based on a 6″ Pearl E-ink screen and it does have a Neonode touch screen. It has only the one power button, Wifi, 2GB storage, a card slot (upper right edge), and 2 months battery life. Price is $139 and it ships in early June. Ooh, it has an onscreen keyboard, 6 fonts and 7 font sizes, and in general a better user interface.
Update: It’s running Android v2.1 on a Texas Instruments 800MHz OMAPS CPU, but it won’t have apps. B&N figure that if you want apps you’ll get the NookColor. (I’m looking forward to this baby being hacked.)
Jamie Iannone, head of digital product development, also confirmed MyNook, the personal web portal that I showed you a few weeks back.
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Thanks for the quick update. Looks like I’ll be trying this one out.
I love revisionist history.
Good bye.
Would you say there was any surprises at all, or was this pretty much what you expected?
Battery life looks good.
Looks like I imagined complete with e-ink touchscreen and longer bat life. Surprised it’s only 2g storage but it’s expandable. May just be the pic I’m looking at but it looks more boxed out like a square shape than the standard rectangle or ‘paperback’ size reader.
No one has asked the question about whether it supports B&N’s own PDB format. If it doesn’t support it, then PDB is definitely orphaned.
I’ll ask. Thanks!
It’s on their webpage. PDB is no more.
Great question timothy. Also any news about greater mag or app support?
Now it remains to be seen what response, if any, Sony has. I find it odd that Kobo and B&N could come in with such “low” (relatively speaking) pricing compared to Sony, yet use the same touchscreen technology.
I have to admit that between the B&N and Kobo versions, the Kobo is “prettier”, yet the best design remains the Sony.
Although I really like my Sony 950 (and my 505), I find the Kobo and the B&N devices enticing, especially as I usually buy my pbooks at B&N and wouldn’t mind buying my ebooks there as well.
And they have Wifi, which is mroe than can be said for Sony.
Unless you can buy ebooks from multiple sources on it, wifi is pretty much a non-issue for me. I’m not the fastest reader in the world, but I’m always on the lookout for ebooks that interest me as well as the various cheap specials, so the “supply” I have on my reader has yet to fall short of my “demand”. Plus, I’m rarely away from my home computer more than two weeks tops, so I can have no problem adding ebooks before I need to. All of which, for me, makes wifi pretty much unnecessary. Nice to have, but the deal breaker some other folks make it out to be.
Five reasons for the lower pricing:
1- It’s been almost a year since Sony set their price point, so components are likely cheaper
2- Both Kobo and (especially) B&N are moving more readers thany Sony so thy get betr volume pricing
3- Both Kobo and B&N make most of their money off ebooks so they can sell the readers at a lower margin
4- Sony doesn’t compete on price–they said so openly last year
5- The Sony logo alone is worth $20
It looks pretty good but i don’t like the luck of h/w turn page buttons (I hate swiping or whatever).
Plus I hate the fact that B&N doesn’t ship outside US
There are actually side page turn buttons. They’re programmable. They’re not advertising that fact much.
Interesting. Seems like there’s a bit more useless real estate (screen to body ratio) on it than a Sony. I’m glad it’s touchscreen, e-ink, expandable, and I do like the doubling down on the battery life.
Actually, it *looks* like the real thing has page turn buttons on the side.
http://news.cnet.com/2300-17938_105-10007885-6.html?tag=mncol;txt
Those ridges look like butons and the lady *seems* to be pushing a paging button.
And from what I’ve seen, swiping your finger down one of the ridges speed scrolls, or whatever it is they’re calling it.
Really? They have a rifling mode?
Haven’t seen a reader with one since MS Reader.
Doesn’t Sony have it? If you hold down — long press — on a page edge it zooms through pages.
Sony has it two ways: One, hold down the > or < keys. Two, tap the page number and use the onscreen slider.
fj,
They probably consider them ‘tabs’ or ‘levers’
Too funny. I’d never heard of Qwerty keys being termed ‘buttons’ before either.
RiDeLub,
They not only don’t ship outside the U.S., they don’t sell Nook books outside the U.S., not even to vacationing U.S. residents.
Andrys, you’re correct about the Nook/ebook sales limitations of the B&N devices. The only loophole is for military personnel stationed abroad with their device registered to a .mil address. Amazon’s method of using the device ID rather than an IP address for verification purposes is definitely better, IMHO.
Add this right after “credit card infused DRM” on the list of why I don’t care for B&N.
BTW, I was impressed by the claimed battery life…
…until read the fine print.
Two months’ worth of reading a half hour a day?!
Naughty, naughty, B&N!
30 hours battery life is about what the original Nook managed.
Bah! Gorram caveats.
B&N is rather infamous for making grandiose claims that bear closer inspection. It usually makes for some interesting reading on the B&N complaint boards. The “ten day reading life!” and “over a million (now two million) books!” selling points have spawned quite a few threads.