Nooking

[calimac]

Technically, my Nook Color is not an e-reader but a small-format laptop configured to facilitate e-reading. But I find it most useful as a portable computer to take with me on trips to monitor e-mail and do occasional necessary web surfing. It's damnably difficult to type on, but it functions, and it's a lot smaller than a full-sized laptop, which I wouldn't find much easier to use.

One curious property its web browser has is that any web page it visits which is a document file as opposed to an HTML web page - a PDF or .doc file - is downloaded and saved in a folder. Every once in a while I plug the Nook into my desktop computer, so that I can see the file directories which are otherwise unavailable, and clean out that folder.

You know what the most common type of file is that it contains? Restaurant menus. Restaurant web sites often keep their menus as PDFs, and tracking down information on restaurants is one of my most frequent uses of the Nook's web browser on a trip.

This time it also contained a PDF of the DOMA decision, which I downloaded via a newspaper web site when it was released during my last trip. That was something I was definitely curious to read.

Comments

[mithriltabby]

It’s very nice having a computer that fits in your jacket or hip pocket. (And obsessivewoman picks purses based on their having a dedicated Nook-size pocket.) Her grandfather (age 96) has one and loves being able to crank up the font size for his reading comfort.

Typing is the wrong metaphor for interacting with a tablet. Sliding keyboards like Swype and SlideIT are much better— but because everyone is familiar with the QWERTY keyboard layout, the letters are still laid out to keep typebars from jamming on a manual typewriter from the 1870s. If you ever upgrade to a tablet that talks to the Android Market (I think the Nook HD does it these days), you might find a sliding keyboard worth a try.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The descriptions of these products leave me aghast. I don't want to have to learn some whole new method of typing, just because computer companies can't be bothered to make a full sized keyboard. And certainly not one with tapping and sliding, two acts that give me enough trouble on the Nook as it is. And never, never in a thousand family-making years "predictive sliding", where the computer tells you what it thinks you mean. No, never.

[mithriltabby]

Graffiti on the Palm Pilot was like that: “I have to learn a new alphabet? Really?” I find that Swype feels a lot like just lazily failing to lift my finger from the screen when typing on the soft keyboard— but it’s still a far cry from typing 60 words per minute on a real keyboard. There are a variety of portable Bluetooth keyboards that fold up or roll up that can let you do real touchtyping on a tablet; those could be worth a look if you get to the point of “I like my tablet but there are times I need a real keyboard”.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Then I would have to persuade my Nook to read Bluetooth. I don't know how to do that either; I struck out with my phone. I took photos on my phone but I couldn't transfer them with a cable. Perturbed, I contacted the provider, who said I could easily transfer them with Bluetooth except that my phone didn't HAVE Bluetooth, bwa-ha-ha.