The Barnes And Noble Nook

Barnes and Noble NOOK eBook Reader (WiFi only)

The Barnes & Noble Nook may or may not be an Amazon Kindle killer. Part of the conclusion will ultimately come down to personal taste. But objective features and price will play a role, too, as will the amount of content offered by their stores.

Certainly, the Nook has some seriously competitive features. First and foremost is the dual screen. The Nook offers a similar 6 inch, black-and-white, E Ink display, but adds a very handy 3.5 inch color touchscreen LCD for feature navigation.

That touchscreen can be used for turning pages (apart from the Back and Forward buttons on the side) as well as for buying books and taking notes. In addition to other menu-navigation features, it lets you choose a book by its cover (a tiny color graphic). Users can also swap in and out a virtual keyboard, something the physical keyboard of the Kindle doesn't allow.

At an easy-to-hold 7.7 inches high x 4.9 inches wide x 0.5 inches thick, this device will fit comfortably in all but the smallest hands. Weighing only 12.1 ounces (343 grams), reading any of the up to 1,500 books it will hold will cause no fatigue. And, fortunately, though the 2 GB storage is half the latest Kindle model, it can be expanded by a microSD card, unlike its chief rival.

Like one Kindle version, it offers 3G connectivity in addition to Wi-Fi, and unlimited Wi-Fi access is available at all Barnes and Noble stores for free. Unlike the Amazon offering, that 3G connectivity is free from AT & T.

With 10 days of (average use) battery life, you won't have to care about anyone else's specs in this area. Except for the longest vacations, few will mind plugging it in once in a while. And, since the battery recharges in about 3.5 hours, it's portable again pretty quickly. Of course, for the truly needy, one could purchase an additional battery. Unlike the Kindle, the one in the Nook is user-replaceable.

Also unlike the Kindle, the Nook supports the "open source" format, ePub, along with its own PDB, Adobe's PDF, and more. There is support for a wide variety of graphic formats, including JPG, GIF, PNG, and BMP. With a screen this size, it won't replace your laptop, but it's useful for photo viewing and other purposes.

Also unlike the Kindle, you can read eBooks purchased from sites other than Barnes & Noble's own. Viewing content originally stored on your PC, Mac, iPhone, and BlackBerry is possible, too. Added to that differentiating feature is the ability to (temporarily) loan your eBook to others.

The content possibilities are immense, too. Amazon offers over 700,000 books in its Kindle store, an impressive number to be sure. But the Barnes & Noble store adds to that number bringing it to 1 million by adding a large number of public domain books. That won't be of any interest to most readers, but for those who love old, old books (out of copyright by virtue of age) it's a nice feature. Naturally, that number also includes almost all the latest bestsellers.

The Barnes and Noble Nook eReader doesn't offer a ton of dazzling features that put it well beyond the Amazon Kindle. But the Nook uses Google's Android operating system under the covers. So, it could add features later via Internet download/update. So, an already very good device could actually grow after your purchase into a great one. That sounds like a killer competitor to me.