Barnes and Noble just lost themselves a customer.

The BBQ Pit
1

This past Christmas, my wonderful girlfriend picked me up a nook tablet as a gift. She lucked out and found one brand new at a flea market for $75. (Not stolen, registered it with B&N, checked with cops, etc.) Now, for what my girlfriend paid, it’s a decent enough tablet; however, I’d never recommend it for anyone.

First of all, it’s $250. That’s $50 more than what Amazon charges for the Kindle Fire, and the specs on the two are quite similar.

Then there’s the storage space. B&N advertises it as having 16gb of space built into it. What they don’t tell you is that only 1gb of that space is for content you already own. If you want to use the other space, you have to buy content from them.

This leads me to the next bit of my rant. They decided to limit the NT to their apps, and their apps only, instead of allowing you access to the tens of thousands of free apps on the android market. Which is what the NT is, an android tablet with the good bits restricted. If their market has the same app that is free in other places, you can bet they charge for it.

The biggie though, and this is what caused them to lose me as a customer forever, is the charger. At first glance, it looks like a bog standard micro usb charger that is everywhere these days. On closer inspection though, it isn’t. They made the part you plug into the NT longer than the other chargers, so that you have to have one they made, and they made them quite shitty. In less than 4 months mine tore up. I go online to see how much a replacement is, and they want $25 for a replacement. I get to looking around, and their charger has thousands of 1 and 2 star ratings because of how shitty they are. They’ve been shitty for years apparently, and have done nothing to improve upon them.

My local B&N is sold out, and when I went online to order one, the order went through. I then recieved an email saying that they were back ordered, so I would have to wait for one to come in before I could get it.

So fuck you B&N. I shopped for years at your stores, bought countless books online, and had been buying ebooks from you. No more. I’ll take my business elsewhere, and be sure to tell everyone why.

2

I like proper books. That won’t help you of course.

3

I’m a bit surprised that there aren’t after-market chargers available.

On a more general note, my impression is that there are way too many types of chargers. Can’t they be standardized like batteries?

4

No.

5

The Fire doesn’t have access to everything on the Market either; it’s limited to what’s available on the Market through Amazon (out of the box at least; you could root it, but most people don’t want to go through that hassle). The latest software update allows you to go to the Market website (before, you were automatically redirected to Amazon’s app page), but you still can’t download apps directly from the Market (without rooting). It’s just one of those things that remind you that for $300 less, you’re not getting a full-on tablet, you’re getting a hand-held gateway to Amazon or Barnes & Noble, that you can read books on, and do a few other things.

6

They pretty much are shifting toward USB (mini or micro) as standard - and many devices now only come with the cable, which you can plug into a generic USB wall wart.

But there are some manufacturers out there who want to do it their way -such as the OP’s device (Nokia is another manufacturer that’s still feebly swimming against the flow)

7

I believe the EU has mandated that all new cell phones must have USB mini chargers, because of the huge amounts of waste that was being generated when people changed phones. The US could certainly do the same.

8

I’m surprised B&N is still around. Maybe I’m confusing them with Borders…

9

OH, NO!!! Another government regulation. Get big government off my back even if it is the best thing for all of us.

This must be a plot by Obama to torch the constitution, strip us of our rights and make himself a lifetime dictator.

There can be no other explanation.

10

:confused: I’m a bit scandalised by this talk of rooting! In fact the mind boggles…:eek:

Darn I lead a sheltered life.

11

I was going to post something similar. It seems the US is, inexplicably, proud of its inefficiencies and waste, just as it is proud of its growing general ignorance when compared to pretty much the rest of the first world at this point.

Wasn’t it recently that Republicans were up in arms about the newly-mandated efficiency standards for the incandescent bulb, a technology that’s over 100 years old?

So no, I don’t see the US adopting a standard for cell phone chargers in the near future, and if Obama expresses support for it, you can be certain the Republicans will make sure it never, ever happens.

12

I didn’t realise the shift to USB wasn’t happening everywhere.

It’s such a big convenience to have devices that all charge from the same standardised cable.

13

Amazon has a large selection of Nook charging cords:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/104-3796580-2511924?field-keywords=nook%20charger&url=index%3Dblended

That thing about only having 1gb for non- B&N content is raging bullshit.

14

Barnes and Noble will send you a replacement cable for free if you call customer support and it’s within 6 or 12 months old since it was bought, I can’t remember the cutoff date.

Also, root that nook tablet! Anyone who owns any sort of android device should ALWAYS root it if possible, especially the nook color/tablet. You’ll get SO much more functionality out of it, it’s not even funny. I adore my nook color to DEATH, and feel like I couldn’t live without it, but it’d suck if it weren’t rooted.

The cables are junk though. The replacement cable I got for free just recently broke, so I bought a generic one off of amazon and it’s doing fine, but it doesn’t have the little n light to show it’s charged/charging. Oh well.

Also, there is a good(ish) reason that the nook has a slightly different micro USB port. it’s because they added an extra pin or two so the device could draw a higher amperage from the charger. The nook has a big battery in it, and the cable allows it to get a full charge really fast compared to if you had to use a regular usb cable. Sucks that it’s different, I know… trust me, I know. But that is the reason for it.

15

Well, it was true as of around 2 weeks ago. But, yeah, now it is untrue. You can bring it in to B+N and they will repartition it to allow for more non Barnes content.

16

I meant bullshit as in “it’s bullshit that they would even require a separate partition for their own content”, not bullshit as in “false”. Having to take it into a store to get it repartitioned is also bullshit, and by “bullshit”, here, I mean, “bullshit that I have to go out of my way to fix a bullshit problem that their bullshit tech designers caused in the first place.”

Hope that cleared it up. :slight_smile:

17

Sure, they can (except for the special case of devices that legitimately need more power or voltage than standard USB sockets are built to provide). For obvious reasons (i.e. charging $25 for a $2.50 device), some vendors prefer not to.

18

I bought a “NOOKColor” (official B&N spelling that will not be used again due to its stupidity) not long after it came out and I rooted it pretty quickly and have always liked it as an eReader. I’m still not sold on eReaders at all, especially LCD screen ones, but I’ve used it on trips and planes and enjoyed it in that regard.

The nice thing about the nook color, and I don’t know if this applies to the nook tablet, is you just get a high speed SDHC card and you put the full version of the Android OS you want onto that and you can essentially “root it” and use normal Android without actually permanently removing B&N’s software. It means you basically can preserve your warranty but still get full Android functionality.

I read a lengthy review on Ars Technica comparing the nook tablet to the Kindle Fire and they actually came out saying the nook tablet is a better device, in terms of responsiveness, build quality etc. Really the only thing Amazon’s device has as an advantage is its Amazon branded App Store is superior to the B&N branded app store, but with rooting those are non-issues. The Kindle fire’s built in browser is apparently horrific, and routes all traffic through Amazon servers to “speed it up”, it ends up that process actually causes all traffic to be slowed down dramatically versus any other browsing method.

Not sure about the nook tablet, but the nook color can be charged by any standard micro USB charger, if you look at the proprietary charger you’ll notice it looks like a standard microUSB, and for most intents and purposes it is. If you don’t have an original B&N charger you can use any standard microUSB charger. However, as another poster said the difference w/the proprietary charger is it is much faster at charging the device, so if you charge it using a standard microUSB charger it charges at a “trickle pace” and takes many hours.

That’s a limitation of the microUSB default standard, not B&N’s fault. It is fine to charge a cell phone with microUSB, but you wouldn’t charge a full size laptop with one, and that is why laptop power cords aren’t microUSB. With larger batteries in hand held devices it’s probably going to become more likely we move more to using laptop-style power cords for them and not microUSB.

19

Back in Sept, for my birthday, a friend of mine bought me a Nook First Edition before they took them off the market. I went in there a few months ago to exchange the case a relative bought me for Christmas (it was for the Nook that’s short and squarish, not longer and rectangular like mine) and the girl at the counter where I exchanged it seemed positively horrified that I owned a First Edition.

I’m not one of those people who HAVE to have the latest, greatest technodoohickeys (yes that’s a technical term…technodoohickey :D) with all the features. I use my Nook for reading and very, very rarely for anything else, since using the WiFi feature drains the battery in no time flat. I happen to LIKE my Nook First Edition because I don’t use it for anything BUT reading library books and downloading free books (thank you Books On the Knob and Project Gutenberg! :D) and that’s it. I don’t need it to have a t housand billion apps, I don’t need it to be in color (that’s what my computer is for, on the rare occasion I download a comic book from the library), I don’t need it to make me a cup of coffee. I need it to do EXACTLY what it does…which is allow me to read books. :slight_smile:

20

You need rooting to access the Market, but if you download the .apk files elsewhere you can install them on the Fire without rooting.