The Barnes and Noble Nook has finally arrived, it is purported to be the new "Kindle Killer".  In this article we will compare the Nook to the industry leading Amazon Kindle 2.  Both electronic book readers are competing with each other at the $259 price-point. The Kindle was first on the scene back in late 2007 with the original Kindle, will the new Nook be able to knock Amazon off it's high perch and take over the electronic book world?

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Screen

The Amazon Kindle and the Barnes and Noble Nook both utilize the same e-Ink electronic paper displays. Both are 6 inches (15.24 cm) and use 16 level gray scale to display text and images. Not much to compare here, they are identical. The B&N Nook incorporates a 2nd display at the bottom however,  This second screen has touchscreen functionality and also serves as the keyboard.  The main point of this second screen is to be able to flip through covers of your books allowing you to quickly find what you are looking for.  This is the first electronic reading device with two screens to hit the mainstream. Love it or hate it, we are a bit skeptical of it. If you see the video posted on Barnes and Nobles Nook page, it shows a bit of delay when using the touchscreen, like the hardware can not handle the task and this makes it look a bit less attractive. [B&N Homepage Video].  Demoing our own nook we have found the same slowness or "lag" on the second screen. Perhaps a firmware update in the future will fix this but we think it has to do more with hardware limitation than software code.

See next page for pictures...

nook second screen

We found that the Nook and the Kindle have the same screen and the Nook may offer very slightly better contrast although it can be hard to tell.  The Nook takes longer to change pages (Refresh) than the Kindle 2, while this may not be noticeable to someone who buys the Nook as their first electronic book reader, it certainly will be to anyone that has owned a Kindle 2.