Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch With GlowLight Review: An E-Reader That Truly Lets You Read Anywhere - walkerbegaid

Barnes &ere; Noble has made the best e-reader currently available even out better by integrating a light source into it. Priced at $139 (as of April 24, 2012), the Nook Simple Touch With GlowLight E Ink-settled e-reader sets the standard for silklike-smooth over reading and shopping. And even better, you can enjoy reading it wherever you happen to be, whether you're lounging on the lawn in bright sunlight, or sitting low the covers with little to no light in the room.

Although monochromatic E Ink e-readers pee sentience in many circumstances, recitation in the dark is non one of them. The bedside lamp, or the overhead light in an airplane, can often be overkill, and a disturbance to other people near you. With this e-reader, you're paying a $40 premium for the honor of having a built-in light, but the versatility that the integrated reading light offers you is well valuable the unscheduled bucks.

The GlowLight makes the Nook Simple Touch e-reader highly pliable to your environment–and it makes Barnes & Noble the first fellowship to unfeignedly deliver on the promise of a built-in light source. Sony tried to do so four age ago, with its Reader PRS-700, but that model's LED lighting, while useful in a pinch, barely reached the center of the page.

Barnes & Noble's Corner Simple Touch With GlowLight doesn't have that problem. The LED light guide sits indoors the Nook's bezel, at the top of the 600-by-800-pixel, 6-edge in E Ink Pearl display. The light shines retired on the presentation, creating a mostly equally lit surface. The illumination runs a trifle brighter near the top of the screen, but non distractingly soh. While testing the Corner Simple Bear on With GlowLight, I establish that the GlowLight transformed spots I formerly well-advised e-lector dead zones into veritable recitation spaces, whether I was in bed recitation in the dim, or sitting happening a reddish-heart flight looking at to unbend with a volume without disturbing my seatmates with the too-bright overhead light.

Personally, I've never found a crop-along light, normally at least a $20 option, to be adequate; IT's only one more thing for me to remember to stock around. More important, the light that the Nook SimpleTouch With GlowLight delivers is more subtle and targeted than anything a attachable light or overhead light could always Hope to attain, and that alone makes the inbuilt light a win. It even came in handy in close-light situations, much as in a sunlight-kissed airplane with nobelium cabin lights along; in this environment, the GlowLight caused the school tex on the Corner Simple Tinge to pop many, and ready-made it easier to read.

In practice, accessing the GlowLight is dead half-witted, and requires no fumbling in the dark. Simply tap and hold the 'n' button at the bottom of the screen, and the powdery comes on; the longer you prevail, the brighter it gets. (You tap and hold once more to turn the GlowLight off.) You can besides adjust the light-colored directly from an on-screen slider control, by tapping at the transcend status exclude of the Nook.

Every bit you power expect, the GlowLight takes a toll on the Corner's battery life. With the GlowLight connected for about 30 minutes a day (and Wi-Fi dispatch), Barnes & Honourable says, you can ask to get about indefinite month of battery life-time; that's incomplete of the over two months quoted for the original Corner Simple Touch. If you fall dormant patc interpretation, however, you won't drain the shelling: The light will time out automatically subsequently 5 minutes of inactivity.

This new model retains the dimensions of the original Nook Simple Touch e-reader, measuring 6.5 away 5.0 aside 0.47 inches. That means it is a half-inch wider than the fourth-contemporaries Amazon Kindle. (The original Nook Simple Touch remains in B&N's lineup, and drops to the second spot on our Top E-Readers chart bum its GlowLight cousin.) In spite of the addition of the GlowLight, this e-reader weighs ever-so-slightly less than its predecessor, sliver 15 grams, or 0.03 pound, off the Simple Touch's 0.47-pound weight. It's still somewhat heavier than the $79 fourth-generation Kindle With Special Offers (0.37 pound). Unlike Amazon's e-readers, though, Barnes & Noble continues to bid an ad-free experience, at no extra cost.

Without the light-headed on, the spick-and-span GlowLight e-reader stands away only due to the decorative gray-haired trim surrounding the outer edge of the front bezel. Although I generally prefer every last-black bezels, since they help text pop from the block out, I base that the gray-headed trim didn't detract from the readability of text.

Like the Nook Simple Relate before it, the Nook Simple Touch With GlowLight uses Neonode's Zeforce infrared touch engineering. The touchscreen is a joy to use; it was highly amenable to my swipes and lights-out, even when I was apace typewriting out searches in the Nook computer memory or setting up the e-reader's Wi-Fi connection. I also found the new Nook to be remarkably well balanced to hold, in one hand operating theatre two.The e-reader's front and back both have a rubber finish, and the backplate cover dips comfortably, effectively giving the Corner a inbuilt deal grip.

Exploitation the Nook, Revisited

So much of the Nook Simple Touch With GlowLight is an repeat of its non-glowworm full cousin. It corpse visceral to navigate. A release with a lowercase 'n' beneath the screen serves American Samoa the home push button (in addition to energizing the GlowLight). The 'n' starts the Corner's wake-up process; you past slide your finger on the screen to wake the device fully. The button likewise returns you to the on-CRT screen quick-navigation buttons (abode, library, shop, hunt, GlowLight, and settings).

At the back of the e-lector, you'll find the power button, shaped to match your fingertip. The power button doubles as another way to wake the e-reader, and it can serve to power down the unit all.

My biggest gripe with the Nook's design concerns its physical navigation buttons. Though they'atomic number 75 slightly improved over the controls on the original Corner Simple Touch, the pageboy-forward and page-back buttons on the Nook Undecomposable Touch With GlowLight are still clay, and require a very on the nose and deep press to activate.

Unmatchable other nitpick: The contrast is non as good on the GlowLight version as on the plain Nook Shield-shaped Touch. This job appears to result from the antiglare protector on the GlowLight modeling; the backclot of the display is a darker gray than along the plain Nook, and that in turn causes black text on the GlowLight version to lack the same sex appeal as on the run-of-the-mill Nook.

I hold out hope that the contrast might follow adjustable via a future firmware update. The original Nook Simple Touch had suffered from line issues, and that model got a firmware update in November 2011 that greatly improved the contrast of text and nontextual matter; as a result, blacks appeared darker, and text and graphics jumped off the screen. That firmware update introduced the Nook's text-smoothing enhancements, too. Thanks to those improvements, plus the flexible font options, Nook models straightaway have the best-looking text you fanny buy on an e-reviewer today.

The Nook Simple Mite With GlowLight also provides speedy page-refresh rates and page turns. The e-reviewer hush does a full refresh in one case every sixth page, but by playing what appears to be a fast dissolve between pages, B&N lets you in effect relocation ahead done dozens of pages, spell mitigating the annoying Thomas Nelson Page-flashing effect long associated with E Ink. B&N does targeted refreshes on a page that has just graphics ever-changing (for good example, in the e-reader's bookstore), and happening areas that have a with child redraw.

Navigating the Interface

You can turn pages by tapping on the left OR correctly side of the screen, though if you prefer you can swipe left to good (and, on some screens, eventide vertically) to change pages too. Patc recital, you can tap at the top of the screen to reveal a status bar, which shows the shelling status, a clock, and a tap-to-supply bookmarker; it also reveals the same book-navigation buttons that you would get if you tapped in the center of the foliate. The buttons jump you to the board of contents, let you seek for a word or passage within a book, help you movement to a specific page within a book using a slider (and kudos to B&N for including Hera just how galore pages are left in the chapter), or allow you to adjust text options (you can buoy choose from six not-thus-different fonts and vii real different fount sizes).

I found it annoying that I'd frequently have to move my hand all the way up to the top to find the X icon to rule out of a page. Practically entirely other happening-riddle navigation is in the lower incomplete of the screen, which successful that finger go feel uneconomical. Beyond that one port hassle, though, B&N's other clean, logical software design is impressive. The company intelligibly gave some view to the layout, As well atomic number 3 to how things operate. The interface is good, at times even great–simply not perfect.

An example is how B&N has implemented its notes and highlights features. Genuinely, these remain the most usable examples of such features that I've seen along an e-reader up to now. You tap and hold your finger on a word to select it; afterward, you can either drag the pins to select a passage, operating theater choose an action such as adding a note or looking ahead the word in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. Unfortunately, you can't reckon all notes, highlights, surgery a combination of the ii; alternatively, you see just a teaser of the passage under a yellow journalism for notes and highlights in the table of contents.

For now, you terminate view and share highlighted quotes with Gmail contacts, via Facebook or Twitter. You can also share information about books you're reading material, to make a recommendation, situatio your reading status, rate and review a Word of God, or like it on Facebook. The Corner Simple Touch has the same Nook Friends capabilities as the Nook Color and Corner Lozenge do; this social platform moves reading away from being a solitary exercise, simply it does so in a less intrusive, less each-about-Maine way than on competition Kobo's social group platform. And it makes the functions far easier to economic consumption than on Amazon's Kindle.

Other Features

The bookstall portal has been redesigned. Its new interface, joined with the touchscreen, makes shopping far simpler than before. The Nook Five-needled Touch With GlowLight has 2GB of constitutional storage, plus a MicroSDHC card slot for additional store hidden beneath a sound flap unofficially. In addition to sideloading ePub and PDF files, the Nook reads JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP effigy files. Unlike many other e-readers, however, the Corner reflows PDF text, which makes it great for reading words, but a mixture if you'Re nerve-wracking to view a document that's heavy on its particular layout.

The e-lector runs Humanoid 2.1, which makes changes and tweaks via firmware update viable. But the device has atomic number 102 Web browser and no on-board e-mail guest, unsatisfactory omissions given how centric these items can be to recitation.

Mount up the 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi is unchaste. The device automatically searches for and reconnects to your last mesh, even when booting up after a complete shutdown. Users get freed Wisconsin-Fi access at AT&T hotspots nationwide.

Bottom Line of work

At $139, the Corner Simple Touch With GlowLight is the best e-reader you can buy out today. The built-in light makes for a compelling addition, and puts this speedy e-reader in a class by itself until other manufacturers play catch-astir. The illumination alone is worth the premium, simply honestly it's not much of a premium when you consider that archrival Amazon continues to sell its Amazon Kindle Touch, without "Special Offers" advertisements and lacking a light, at $139. That alone should wee-wee bookworms bask in the glow of the Simple Impact With GlowLight.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/470173/barnes_and_noble_nook_simple_touch_with_glowlight_review_an_e_reader_that_truly_lets_you_read_anywh.html

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