Barnes & Noble treats Nook Color to Froyo; unveils Nook Apps
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
1. Amazon now has to bring out a tablet running Android. It is only a matter of time before the NC drops to under $200 and then people start buying the NC instead of Kindle. While rooting the NC is easy, if you check the downloads of the images, I would say less than 15% end up actively rooting. So that means no Kindle app on NC.
2. Apple now has to figure out alternate uses for the iPad since they are going to get disrupted on the browsing/email/ebook-reader category. I don't even know if they can bring out a 7" iPad (current investments in 10" and maybe even hardware optimized for 10"). Looks like they are trying to repurpose the iPad into a gaming device. In any case, they can't be happy with the rapid rise of NC. Strangely B&N is the only company which has a lower supply chain cost than Apple in the tablet market -- they own retail, they don't have to do any OS development, they don't have to put out the latest hardware.
I don't know if its lower than Apple's, but it's probably lower than anyother Android vendors except probably Samsung.
1. NC is using older generation parts (ex. their SoC is OMAP3621 which is at least two generations behind). This is off the shelf from Texas instruments who own the entire supply chain in design and foundry. Look at all the products using this technology -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_OMAP#OMAP3 -- now you are looking at pretty decent volume and per unit cost.
2. 6 million vs 15.4 is not very meaningful in per unit cost difference since both volumes are pretty huge. This is not accounting for the fact that other companies could be using this SoC. Also, Apple does custom design for thier own products so Samsung cannot sell off their chips to someone else. So Apple has to invest in design and all the associated costs in the development and obsolescense of the chips. Given the tight margins it is not surprising Apple buys gross manufacturing capacity below forecasts and let shortages occur.
Not only does B&N have a retail presence (and a great customer experience) but it owns a big part of the foodchain too. If Amazon loses its sales tax edge or B&N can end-run its sales tax disadvantage...
1. Now Nook is just another Android pad. Amazon has Android app for Kindle. Nook is a Kindle. Good luck to B&N on trying to compete with the rest of the market. They'll probably be buying whatever is cheap and just re-branding it, as I'm sure they're doing now. This will mean it's not a quality product.
2. People will continue to buy iPad no matter where the market goes. It will continue to be the trend-setter when it comes out soon with a hidef screen, 3d and battery life to match. The fact that B&N doesn't do any Hardware or Software work will mean their quality and finish will suffer. I imagine they're selling it at cost or slightly above to stay competitive with the Kindle.
My guess, in the long run, people will have a new Android pad and then another. Kindle users will still be using their device for reading and buying books because that's all it does. But when color e-Paper come out, Amazon will be the only manufacturer with a mature OS that is practical for the slow refresh rate of e-Paper. The battery life and display quality over typical LCDs will make it appeal to a niche that no other device has.
2. True, but will there a big enough market for all these features?. Apple can make the greatest tablet, but if their margins are challenged and the customers flock to a low cost good-enough device then I don't think Apple will be pleased with the result. B&N made a profit for the first time in many quarters. They sold a boatload of Nook Colors. I doubt they are losing money on NC.
Amazon did not shutdown their SDK? How to you think the App store is populated with apps without an SDK? Obviously, you are just a bit biased and your opinion is not objective.
Also, The Kindle SDK program hasn't been canceled. It's still available as it's always been, though still in Beta.
Honestly, the nook seems like a cheap version of the iPad or Android tablets. I wouldn't compare it with the Kindle because if it doesn't have e-paper, it is not an e-reader.
They also managed to survive while Border's went broke: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=BKS&t=6m&l=on&z=...
The stock is so beaten down because when Borders started to fall over it looked like book stores were all going to die one by one just like the brick and mortar music stores did.
That gets you access to the SDK. Access to the store is a messier deal. I've found brief summary docs, and a pointer to the application, in two places:
http://nookdeveloper.zendesk.com/entries/20009311-qualify-as... https://nookdeveloper.barnesandnoble.com/nook-app-dev.html
Requirements for being a developer include at least a U.S. bank account and Tax ID#; the questionnaire also wants you to say why you're serious, and what other platforms you've already shipped on. (Having an app and wanting to sell it doesn't prove that you're serious enough?)
Royalty terms are given in the press release at 70% of the sale price, but I'm still looking for the page that explains whether that's after discounts (and if so, by how much), and explains the other terms and conditions.
And for the record I'm very much NOT an Android or iOS fanboi; as both a software dev and consumer i like various aspects of each ecosystem.
The smaller form factor really shines for reading ebooks, email, and cool feed readers like pulse. It's super responsive for all 2D tasks (reading, movies, games like Angry Birds) and you can hold it in one hand for extended periods unlike the iPad, which gets a little fatiguing after a half-hour or so.
The eMail and gmail apps are great, Dolphin Browser HD and Firefox are good alternatives to the standard browser in Gingerbread, and it Tweets well enough. Youtube app plays well. Flash mobile is... well, it's flash on a mobile device (warts and all). Load all fantastic flash ads on demand!
The processor is sporty (not fast), that is unless/until you root it and overclock it. I've got CPU governor set to "performance" and have it set at 600 MHz minimum and 1.1 GHz max. That said, Angry Birds ad-free plays silky smooth; with ads, it's a slog, but that's with almost any android device I've seen aside from my dual-core, nVidia-powered Atrix 4G phone. The overclocking produces no more heat or detrimental effects that I can perceive, so I believe they underpower the CPU by default.
The Omap SoC has a decent graphics card that can play, for example, Backbreaker Football in 3D without any jitter and few (if any) dropped frames at all. It runs quadrant (synthetic benchmark) at an overall score of 2100+ and a 26.4 fps on neocore.
It's a daily driver for me. The screen is great, it's super portable yet more substantial than a smartphone (especially for reading/surfing), and I've been actually reading more now than ever (split between nook's app and the kindle app).
Standby drains about 10-12% battery in a 24 hour period I reckon.
Would something like that read fine? Apologies for a pile of questions: Nook Color isn't available here in Canada, and I was thinking of taking a bus trip to Buffalo to grab one of these if the Nook is worth it.
Even with Froyo, I'm still looking to turn mine into a non-Android tablet. (Or perhaps a hybrid...?) Especially since it's so easy to run a system from the μSD card. $250 toy indeed. Yet so well-built for the price.
Does this mean that manufacturers are giving up on e-paper already (after years of telling us it was so much easier to read than a backlit screen)? I must say that I've spent a lot of time staring at my old-school Nook by now and I'm not really convinced that it's any easier to read than an iPad screen.
Granted, that's a great niche to be in. My reservations: it had a weak speaker, it felt a bit bendy, and it didn't seem to rotate the screen too often when I switched from horizontal to vertical orientation. I don't think its software was designed to rotate as often as iOS does. I can definitely see having one of these around the house to hack on but it's got flaws.
The speaker's very weak, but mine doesn't feel bendy at all. It's very solid, considering the price.
I've noticed this too, that iOS devices do the screen rotation thing with far more grace than Android devices.
You can cache data and make rotates pretty seamless, but it still seems like a decent amount of overhead that wouldn't necessarily be there.
In iOS the default seems to be that any and every app will rotate in a meaningful way when I turn the device. Not so in my 5 minute demo of the Nook. It's not that it can't smoothly rotate the screen when it wants to, it's that it doesn't attempt to rotate the screen to match my position as often as iOS apps do.
It was your particular phrasing of this issue that made me think that this may be a feature of the Nook, and not a bug.
My biggest complaint about any iOS device used to be that when I was reading in bed, sometimes I would lie on my side, causing the screen to rotate when I didn't really want it to. Obviously, the screen-orientation lock functionality was a godsend for fixing this issue for me.
It occurs to me that maybe, since the "primary" function of the Nook is reading, that it doesn't attempt screen rotation unless it really thinks that was your intent.
The speaker is positioned in the rear and it pushes sound away. I'm sure they did that for aesthetic (decluttered front bezel) and functional (no worrying about getting schmutz in the speaker grill) reasons. But, yeah, that causes distant, disembodied sound.
I find my Nook Color solidly built for the price. The nice glass screen (I use an anti-glare screen protector to use it outside) is super-responsive almost to a fault. The plastic bezel is solid and finished well and doesn't seem to flex or pop when I hold it. The back plastic has a really grippy rubber coating that makes it nice to hold in one hand, as well. I think if they were to iterate, they should do away with the front plastic bezel and rock a total glass front, but I give it nice marks. I'd certainly consider paying up to 100 more for it and not be dissatisfied.
About rotation, I think it's Apple's use of transitional animation that makes it feel like it's more responsive and, thus, more "accustomed" to it. The NC has the same accelerometer chip as the Xoom, so I think if you perceive any lag, it could be in the redrawing of the screen.
That said, if you'd ever buy one, forgo all the installed software, root the device, and put a version of Cyanogenmod 7 (2.3 Gingerbread) on it. I use phiredrop 6. Stable as a table, full Android Market (and Amazon, btw), and youtube in fullscreen and flash in the browser.
Being the owner of both an iPad and a rooted Nook Color, there's a pretty large quality gap between the two. That's not to say the NC is terrible -- the NC is actually a serious value buy -- but it's a testament to the competitive advantage that Apple has over everyone else in the tablet market.
Only 8 hours to a charge.
Takes 3-4 hours to recharge.
No USB Charging.
Let's see there's ... Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Android Marketplace, GetJar, various device manufacturers (Lenovo, Motorola, General Mobile), and various phone companies around the world. http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/12/30/the-ongoing-mess-of-andr...
There's probably at least a dozen, if not more.
This sounds like a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
If all the app stores were just stores competing on a level playing field it would be a good thing, but they're obviously not. Most of these are not real "stores", they are schemes for extorting money from users and developers by removing (not enhancing) their ability to choose.