Barnes & Noble’s Nook vs. the Sony Reader Pocket Edition

Jun 25 2010

I recently got a chance to do a side-by-side comparison of the Nook and my Sony Reader. My main interest was in the speed and smoothness of the page turns.

My (un)scientific experiment showed that the Sony Reader is slightly faster than the Nook. However, the difference is so small that it would be a non-issue if I had to decide between the two.

Another feature I looked at was the reading screen contrast (the background color and the text color). The Nook clearly won in the contrast category. The Nook’s screen contrast is crisp, clear and easy on the eyes.

Then I compared the Nook to my first generation Sony Reader PRS-500. The contrast on my old Sony Reader is a joke. Nook won by a long shot. However, I was very surprised to see that the page turn speed and smoothness on my old device was still a little ahead of the Nook.

I love doing these side-by-side comparisons of the various e-readers that are on the market. Ideally, I’d like to do videos, so you can see the results for yourself. For this comparison, however, a video was not possible.

One Response

Brad, I just would like to add something that no reviewer has mentioned is that the NOOK is for me unusable in sunlight, or even under store flourescent light, due to its glossy bezel. That killed it for me even though I held out hope for it due to low price for the wi-fi only and web surfing capability. The latter was also awful compared to the Kindle and the virtual keyboard kept disappearing on me and it was difficult to move around the web page with current software. The hope there is that the software will eventualy be upgraded. But NO SALE for me until they come out with a matte finished bezel like the other two units have.

Charles 7/22/2010 3:47 pm