Barnes & Noble Nook review: Glitches make the Kindle a better choice

This season's biggest shopping dilemma for electronics buyers has been whether to wait for the hot new Barnes & Noble Nook, sold out until January, or buy another e-book reader that will actually arrive before the holidays are over.

Let me solve your dilemma: Don't buy a Nook, and settle for leaving the special Nook gift certificate under the tree. Buy an Amazon Kindle.

Barnes & Noble's first e-book reader may one day be a match for Amazon's. It has some cool features, including a second touch screen for navigation. The Nook shares some key pluses with the Kindle: a relatively modest $259 price, a crisp e-ink screen, and wireless access to content. But based on a few days use of a press sample of the Nook, the device Barnes & Noble launched—or perhaps rushed out—in time for the holidays has enough glitches to make the Kindle the best choice in an e-book reader, at least for now.

None of the Nook's bugs are fatal–even the most serious, the relatively slow pace at which the Nook turns pages compared to the Kindle. Yet each compromises the appeal of the device.

For example, the touch screen, located beneath the e-ink screen, allows you to see and scroll through book covers in color–a welcome touch given that e-ink is strictly monochrome for the time being. But it's less responsive than the screens on most cell-phones. It's also somewhat unpredictable; usually a single press suffices, but sometimes not.

Some other controls are also rather unresponsive. The inverted-u home button located between the screens too often requires a hard push rather than a casual press, I found. Likewise the page-turn arrows, located to each side of the screen, which are harder to use than the Kindle's turn bars.

The Nook's unique book-lending feature is a savvy idea. Yet the beta version of the LendMe feature I tried today was very much a work in progress. Invited to borrow a book, I accepted--only to have the Nook continue to tell me it was "awaiting my decision" on the offer. When I pressed to accept again, it told me it could not complete the request. Confused, I pressed the My Library button, only to encounter the offer yet again--and again have it rejected.

Finally, I navigated past the bothersome screen, and found the book already in my library. After that, which took several muddled minutes, things went smoothly enough, and I could indeed read the book as though I had bought it myself.

Some, perhaps most, of these problems may eventually be remedied through software updates, sent to the Nooks via the wireless network on which they buy content (as with the Kindle, there's no charge for such access; it's build into the price of the device). B&N plans one such patch next week, to address a number of other issues.

Trouble is, it's hard to know which problems will be fixed, and which may require waiting for the second-generation Nook. For what it's worth, slowish page turns on the first Kindle were not remedied until the current, second-generation version of the device.

For now, I'd hold off on considering the Nook at least into the new year, when further software updates are promised. By then, also, a host of other e-book readers will be on the market, including the Sony Daily Edition, an iRex model, and the Skiff, a Hearst/Sprint device expected to be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

Need more info? See our guide to e-book readers. Also, early next week we'll post a video buying guide that compares the Kindle and Nook, and also shows the jumbo Kindle DX and two non-wireless Sony Readers that are also available this fall. –Paul Reynolds.