Kindle Has A Run For Its Money: NOOK Color!!

I'm a Kindle user, but I'm also a bit of a technological junkie, at least if the technology appeals to me as useful. I don't own a cell-phone (my wife has one) because I don't want to talk to people just because they have my cell-phone number and feel like interrupting me.

The idea of carrying a library around in a portable, digitally searchable form, now that's cool. So I got a Kindle, version two and love it. Then Apple introduced the iPad and as usual it's expensive and somewhat questionable as to exactly what use it is. Do I really need a browser that costs as much or more than a netbook.

NOOK Color looks to me like baby iPad, and much more affordable. So I'm officially an early adopter. It has WiFi and holds tons of books. My Kindle has battery life all over it. The Kindle goes for weeks, but its not color, it's browser capability is woeful and it doesn't flip from portrait to landscape like an iPad — but the NOOK Color does all of that. It also supports reading by gesture so the page advance is more natural. It has a memory expansion port. But battery life... not so hot. Maybe ten hours with the wireless off and less, a lot less, with it on.

Still I've loaded it up with all the classic works that I want to carry around and I can now web-browse too but I have to carry the cable to charge it up about once a day. So it's certainly not perfect. Now if it was just really easy to program. I've already loaded a bunch of StarTrek photos to grace my wallpaper and all the works of G.K. Chesterton, Aristotle, and Plato as well as some other folks like William James. I'm sure I'll be filling it up with more stuff as time goes on. Oh yeah, and it reads Microsoft document formats and pdfs. I loaded all my Pragmatic Programmer books into it too. Simply awesome!!