I finally bought an ebook reader

[thewayne]

We had a sizable tax return this year, and I decided on a Nexus 7 tablet. My original goal was to root it, install a command shell program, and use it to experiment with PHP, MySQL, and some mods for WordPress and my photography web site, WayneWestPhotography.com/gallery. My ultimate goal is to have a PHP start page that will show rotating images from the gallery and also the latest post on my blog. I'm certain that I can do this as I've been doing database work for over half my life and have lots of experience.

But a Nexus 7 is really not the right tool for the job, especially considering that I regularly tote around a MacBook Air, which at its heart is a full-blown Unix operating system, not a mostly Unix OS like Android.

I did a lot of research before deciding on the Nexus. My typical research methodology is to look at the worst reviews on web sites to see what kind of problems that I might anticipate. The two contenders rapidly boiled down to the Nexus 7 and the Samsung. The Nexus problems were predominantly screen breakage and lots of complaints of poor tech support from the manufacturer, Asus. And in almost all 1 star reviews a tech from Asus posted his personal work email address and offered to help personally. I was quite impressed by that. In fact, I emailed the guy and told him I was considering a Nexus and he actually replied! Double-plus good on that one!

The main downside on the Samsung was that it was only an 8-gig model, so right off the bat you have to buy an additional memory card, which would make it more expensive than the 16-gig Nexus.

So I bought the $200 Nexus. After adding in a case, the breakage protection, and tax, it's up to $340. Which was more than I was willing to spend, but with a 14 day return period, I thought it worth the experiment.

I bought it last Wednesday during a really major dust storm. I started researching tools for rooting it, and succeeded over the weekend. And I really was not impressed.

We own an iPad, and it's a great device for quite a number of things, but it can't really be used as a development platform and it's too heavy for me to use as an ebook reader in bed. The Nexus is half the weight and worked fine as an ebook reader, but it suffers from one very major problem: unreliable.

Aside from the iPad, I have an iPhone 4S and had an iPod Touch. Application crashes on the iOS devices happen, but with no where near the frequency as I experienced with the Nexus. I hate having to re-start apps. It was a case of good, but not good enough.

So Monday I un-rooted it, returned it to its factory OS configuration, and returned it. And bought a Nook Simple Touch with Glow Light. It cost about a third what the Nexus cost. It's small enough that I can put it in the pocket of my cargo pants, and it reads ePub, which the Kindles won't do directly. I also have a Nook tablet, a slightly older 7” model, and I was surprised to find the Simple Touch doesn't have a web browser, I'm assuming because of the limitations of the E Ink display. So it does have the inconvenience of having to plug in a USB cable to load books if you're not buying them from the B&N web site. I don't mind that as it takes some time to read a book, so it's not a daily inconvenience. And they advertise that the battery is good for ONE MONTH with the light on!

For me, it's a pretty darn good ebook reader. Very, very light for reading in bed and displays text quite well. The light is good for reading in the dark or low-light conditions. I'm currently reading the first volume of Beethoven's letters and am enjoying the experience and have lots of other cool stuff loaded up from Project Gutenberg, which is my main source of ebooks.

Comments

[silveradept]

Glad you found something that works for you.

...he said, writing from his rooted Nook Tablet.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I have an older Nook tablet, probably 3 years old, that I looked in to rooting and just haven't followed through on it yet. One of these days I might.

What version of Android are you running? Do you have a command shell where you can directly type in OS commands?

[silveradept]

Right now, I have Jelly Bean 4.2.2 running (Cyanogenmod 10.1 derivative) on the Nook. There is an app installed with this package called Android Terminal Emulator that is as close to a command shell, if not actually being a command shell, as you can get without using the debug bridge from a computer.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Cool. How old is your Nook? I didn't use the Cynogen kit for rooting it, I used Wug-something. It did a good job rooting it, but I didn't install any different ROM and couldn't find a terminal emulator. So all I could see was the debug bridge, which totally was against what I needed.

[silveradept]

I bought it in 2011 as a refurbished model, used the kit to root and then to install Cyanogenmod 7, which I used until recently, when I upgraded to Jelly Bean. Most off the mod conversions install the terminal emulator as part of their system apps. I think it's available from the Play Store, too.