Nookcolor e-book reader sells itself short

B&N’s latest answer to the immensely popular Kindle from Amazon.com has the makings of a full-fledged tablet computer — one that could compete against Apple Inc.’s iPad. Yet for now, that’s not in the cards.

Or so a B&N exec told me, over and over. It’s an e-reader, he said, and nothing more.

Indeed, the Nookcolor (or NOOKcolor, as B&N refers to it in press materials) is a very good e-reader, at an appealing price of $249. Sure, Amazon.com offers an entry-level Kindle of about the same size for $110 less. But the Nookcolor’s extra features, such as a bright color touchscreen and the ability to run advanced software, easily justify the extra cash.

At about 1 pound, the Nook is a hefty beast. Blame it on the decision to abandon the monochrome E Ink screen used both in the Kindle and in the original Nook, which came out last year.

The Nookcolor’s color screen consumes a lot more juice than the Kindle’s and requires a heavier battery. B&N says to expect eight hours per charge, and based on several days of use, that sounds about right. The Nookcolor comes with eight gigabytes of memory, or enough for about 6,000 books. You can add up to 32 gigs more through a plug-in Micro SD memory slot.

B&N offers about 2 million books, newspapers, and magazines, including lots of free titles. Books generally cost around $10, about the same as on Amazon.com. To purchase books for the Nookcolor, you can plug a USB cable into a desktop computer or download them wirelessly over a Wi-Fi network. Unlike most Kindles, the Nook doesn’t connect to 3G cellular data services. With free Wi-Fi so easy to find these days, this is hardly a handicap.

Forget the Kindle’s sluggish black-and-white Web browser; the Nookcolor browser is the real deal, well-suited for checking Web-based e-mail or updating your Facebook. It doesn’t support Flash videos yet, but B&N plans a free Flash-friendly software upgrade early next year.

The Kindle relies on pushbuttons, but the Nookcolor is touch-controlled. The touchscreen is responsive enough, but oddly inconsistent in its use of multitouch features. You can expand and shrink magazine pages, photos, and book covers with a pinching motion of thumb and forefinger, as on an iPad, but pinching doesn’t work to expand newspaper or Web pages.

Never mind; just touch the screen, and you’ll get a menu with the option to blow up the text, or change its color for better contrast. You can also bring up a table of contents, or highlight text with a finger, then look up the words in a built-in dictionary, on Wikipedia, or on Google.

Open the Nookcolor’s “extras’’ page for a small, but appealing selection of Android apps. Want some music with your literature? There’s an app for the Internet streaming music service Pandora. There are also chess and Sudoku games and a crossword puzzle, as well as LendMe, the cool feature that lets you lend a digital book to a Nook-owning friend for 14 days.

What you won’t find among the extras is access to the Android Market, the online store which sells over 100,000 Android apps. The B&N guy said his company mainly wants apps that will appeal to bookworms. Also, there are plenty of tacky, tasteless apps out there, and B&N doesn’t want to soil its good name, any more than Apple does. So like Apple, B&N plans to launch a Nook app store that will feature only company-approved software.

So what kinds of apps could run on the Nookcolor? With its 800-megahertz processor, it’s capable of handling most any Android programs. Indeed, hackers have already reprogrammed it to run such apps as the popular casual game Angry Birds.

B&N could quickly authorize hundreds of apps — games, social networking software, news and sports programs, and pretty much anything else that runs on the hottest new Android based tablet computer, the Galaxy Tab from South Korea’s Samsung Group.

But the Tab costs up to $650, plus a monthly cellular data bill. The Apple iPad costs about the same. At $249, the Nookcolor is the cheapest high-quality tablet on the market. Or it would be, if B&N would market it as a full-fledged tablet that’s also an excellent e-reader. But B&N won’t do that. For now.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.