I went to B&N and played with the nook again today. I will say this: the latest firmware upgrade is a VAST improvement over what it had before. The touch screen was much more responsive and I liked the menus a little better (even though it was only little changes). I love the addition of a web browser but it looks like it only works on wifi and I didn't connect it to wifi while I was in there, so I don't know how well it works. The nook is still slower in looking up words and doing anything that has to do with navigating on the eink screen. This is mostly because you can't just hold the down button and have the cursor scroll through multiple lines. You have to hit the direction individually each time. That was a minor annoyance for me. Also, and I've been saying this from the beginning, why does the nook not bring up the definition of a word on the LCD? I think this would be a big advantage over the Kindle. Right now the Kindle shows a preview of the definition automatically at the bottom of the screen, which is pretty cool and in most cases gives you what you need to know without opening the dictionary separately. I think it's annoying when I do have to open the dictionary, though. The nook could display the full definition right there on the LCD and it could probably bring it up pretty quickly, too. The nook apparently already worked in a way to display web pages on the LCD. Why not definitions? That's just a non-nook user's pet peeve, though. For the most part, I'm pretty impressed with the improvements. I'll be interested in seeing what Amazon announces next. Amazon has given me a lot of good customer support recently and while I don't generally like brand loyalty, I have grown rather fond of Amazon.
