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I had a 4th Gen Touch for a couple weeks. And I am not in any way an Apple fan or user, ever. I loved the device. The big difference for me over the iPhone is the Retina display essentially removes any sort of eye strain issues. The clarity and crispness of the text are without question best around so far anyway.
As for the wifi, I too live in a wifi challenged community with our only access also at Starbucks or McDonalds. The funny, in a sad way funny, is we have a muni wifi network, and it completely sucks without an special access point to extend the Tx/Rx range and even with with a 400mW rig from Pepwave we are lucky to get 500ft from any of the nodes in town.
Still as a productivity tool I can't argue against the pocket iDevices after having used one in earnest for an extended period. But I would never drop the price of an iPhone, even buying an unlocked unit on eBay is still not near to anything I want to look at price wise. It's nice but not the better part of $1000 nice. Even the ~$300 for the Touch is more than I cared to spend. I got mine for about $175 though thanks to an Audible promo which gave me a $100 credit toward any Audible compatible device or accessory on Amazon. So I grabbed the Touch then a buddy asked if I would setup things for him and he would pay me full price plus my time. Well, easy call for the mercenary side of me. Still i walked away with some extra cash but also knowing I liked the device a lot. If they only offered a 3G version of it w/o a contract at the same price, better around $200-$250 for a 32gb model.
I even experimented with reading larger format reference books and had little problem adapting to the small screen thanks to the multi-touch aspect of the device.
As to the NookCOLOR, not for me. I am to a point in life where I do not want to dick around with hack this, jigger that and duct tape that waaay over there to get something that sort of works sometimes or until updates are out and then nothing I need works until the hackers get around to figuring out what is broken in the update.
Also I flat do not care for the handling of the NC. The awkward screen ratio leads to a rather tall device. because of the design the weight is not well balanced and it can feel quite top heavy even though it is not. The weight is simply evenly distributed and that does not equate to a sense of balanced handling in one hand or even two. I did not try it out beyond that basic handling because I just don't want something I have to get used to the feel. The Touch felt quite natural once it a TPU back cover.
The lack of Flash is also somewhat problematic if the site does not offer on the fly transcoding for iOS device users. If Flash matters to you then iOS devices are not the way to go, period. Silly but it is what it is.
Good luck deciding just thought I would pass along some non-Apple person feedback. I liked the Touch as well as the iPad I got my hands on for about an hour the other day. I just still do feel claustrophobic when using them thanks to the closed nature of data and what not. Yeah it can be somewhat handled via work-a-rounds but again I am just worn out with those over the past few decades. Hope you figure out the best for you.
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