Well, well, well... I have one now
My wife brought me one yesterday and I have to say, so far I'm really happy with it. I wanted to update my Sony reader since some time as the customer service is not really friendly and asked me 200 bucks just to clean inside the screen and didn't want to bother changing the battery.
It's too early to draw any conclusion but:
- The screen: Yes, I have a PRS-700 and even if the light is a nice feature (which I use everyday), the pearl screen is... whoa!
I really like it, it's so deep, it looks really like a page.
Now, I encountered the ghosting problem (after maybe 200 refresh maybe more). It appeared suddenly and you can see the screen is generally darker and make the previous pages white... kinda weird but I was prepared and I restarted the device, everything was fine. Note that I had to make a full shutdown to get rid of it. I hope they will fix it and that it won't happen to often until then.
- Text Formating: Very handy. Nice choice of fonts as well even if I think I will stick with the first one. I will still try different ones sometimes I guess. It's cool to be able to arrange the margins and spacing.
- First run: I had some issue with the wifi, I have an airport router with 2 signals, I tried with the 5GHz first and didn't seem to pick it up so I enter the second one and everything went well! btw, my wifi is not discoverable so that means it didn't appear in the screen selection, I didn't have any trouble to enter the parameters.
It synced my B&N books automatically and the whole operation took me maybe 10 min (5 if you exclude the wifi thing). Nice.
- Feeling: My wife bought me
a cover as well and it fits perfectly and feels good, maybe a bit to square with the angles but it will do until it tears apart.
I'd like to precise that I was really suspicious about the bezel, when I saw the pictures, it seemed huge, it's not. It's really perfect size. The buttons are indeed hard to press but as you handle your reader in this area, that makes sense to me and I'm used to it now.
- General: Yes, you can see that, even if I'm really not a fanboy of anything, the nook is really a good product. I haven't tried the OS deeply yet of course and I know there's quite a thread on quibbles but I'm happy with it. I don't think I will root it. I mean it does all I want: READ BOOKS.
I'll try to find people for the nook friends thingy because it can be cool to have new ideas
even if I currently use goodreads which is fine.
Otherwise, I will stick with the stock software,
I don't need to check my emails or RSS, I'm enough on my phone and in front of a computer. Plus, I put already some books in it and will sync with Calibre if I need to add more books from a specific serie. That's it. I don't need to have all my books with me all the time.
- Soft: Ok, they made a Nook software (mac version) where you can drag and drop (from Calibre) and after create shelves.
The thing is, you can't sync your device with this software as it's apparently only a reader and you can't have access to your ebooks just to drag them in the nook. So, yes Calibre is the way to go. That's good because I love it.
-Formats: I tried some pdf (just text) and it handles them very nicely, the reflow was perfect and fast. Everything seems fast on this machine.
I tried some epub I made from cbr archives and it's gorgeous. Again, I'll try to upload some pictures for people to maybe have a better idea of the device.
For now I read Pride and Prejudice which was loaded in my library (don't ask me why but sometimes I got new books in my library from nowhere...) and LA Noire stories which I bought just before having the Nook.
Last thing, I really wanted to buy a Kobo but (again I'm not a fanboy and don't want to begin a troll war or something) there's a gap between the two. The OS is really fast and the screen is responsive, I didn't feel the same with the Kobo touch. Plus, it was too light and I was worried to break it in my laptop bag (I don't have the problem with the Sony and I'm concerned for the nook either).
Good investment ^_^
update in red