Introduction
The Nook Simple Touch is the latest e-reader from Barnes & Noble (one of the biggest bookstore chain in the US) with ink display and touchscreen support. This review will discuss mostly on my personal experience on the overall functionality and the benefits of rooting this device with instructions on how to do it. For more detailed review or technical specifications, please refer to the Barnes and Noble website or video review on Youtube.

Look and Feel
The device looks pretty good overall, and the size is just right for a portable reader. It has a unibody construction with a rubbery feel to it, naturally this material makes it somewhat scratch-proof, provides a good grip and feels easy to hold with one hand. No complain under this section, simply excellent.

Display Screen
The 6 inch display screen is based on e-ink technology that differs itself from the popular LCD display nowadays. This type of display is non-reflective and very readable under direct sunlight, the sharp contrast makes it similar to reading a paperback novel. Unlike the LCD screen which keeps drawing power to display the screen, the e-ink screen only draws power when it refreshes the screen (upon changing the page) and this makes the battery life last a lot longer under a single charge (up to few weeks) compared to LCD tablets (which won't even last a whole day of usage).

Now the downside of e-ink compared to LCD besides only display color in monochrome is the poor response of the screen, you can expect some ghosting when refreshing pages, poor scrolling and zooming animation on web pages (when rooted) which makes it unsuitable for rich multimedia content, and unlike the LCD screen which emits its own light, the e-ink display is almost impossible to be viewed under poor lighting condition (similar to reading books).

To show how the device looks, I've attached a few screenshots of the device taken outdoor, under morning sunlight.

Battery Life
The battery life is rated for 2months with an hour usage a day with minimal wi-fi activities. From my personal experience with it, this device definitely last pretty long with up to 3 weeks of usage (3-5 hours a day with wi-fi activated 30% of those times) and charging time from USB is around 3 hours, so you definitely won't have to worry about bringing this device with you for a short trip or vacation without the charger.

Overall Functionality (pre-root)
By default the Nook will only function as an e-reader which support popular ebook formats such as .pub, .mobi, etc. All you can do with it besides reading ebooks is shop for ebooks from the online book shop available from the device menu (obviously this is not the only way to get ebooks, you can transfer downloaded ebooks to the device as well), and browsing for ebooks and .pdf documents from you internal storage (2GB) and micro SD card (if present). Overall without rooting, you will miss out some potential that this device have, so unless you plan on strictly reading ebooks, getting this device without intention on rooting it is not really recommended. On the next section I'll discuss some benefits of rooting the device, and some instructions to perform it on the last section.

Now for the reading experience on the nook, basically the ebook reading functionality is spot-on like its meant to be, the sharp contrast of the display makes reading more natural and less fatiguing comparable to reading an actual paperback novel, and with the touchscreen flipping through pages is pretty intuitive. On the other hand, reading .pdf documents is a pretty mixed experience with the nook, if the .pdf doc contains mostly text then its not really an issue viewing it (though it won't retain its original layout format), but on the other hand if the .pdf contains a lot of images like magazine for example, not only will the layout looks wrong, if the images are too large in size it won't be displayed. Based on those reasons, reading .pdf magazines or rich comic is not really recommended with the nook. Lastly by default, the nook doesn't seems to support any image format (though it is specified as one of the feature by B&N) and there's no support for landscape screen orientation as well.

Overall Functionality (rooted)
Basically the Nook is built upon Android OS version 2.1 with the Nook App on top of it, so after rooting it is possible to install other Android Apps that is suitable for this device like web browser, pdf reader, manga reader, and other reader app to extend the functionality of the Nook, for those that have previously used android smartphone or tablet should be very familiar with all these. I personally find the browsing experience average to poor with this device, so it's only recommended using the browser for text-based website like Wikipedia, other useful feature after rooting is the manga app, I find reading manga on this device acceptable, though won't feel quite like reading real manga because of the rather small screen size, I believe 7"-8" screen would make it a more decent size for viewing manga, lastly with rooting you get landscape orientation option for better web or pdf viewing. Overall rooting the Nook won't give the user a full tablet experience because of the screen technology it used and its low specification, but rooting does makes the Nook better in terms of overall functionality against other similar device like Kindle.

Summary
From my personal experience with this device, built quality is great and so does the ergonomic design. it is very suitable for ebooks and other text based content, somewhat acceptable for reading manga (though bigger screen is preferable), and reading online news (after rooting via browser or dedicated app). The long battery life and small size makes it reliable to bring along while traveling. After Amazon launch the Kindle Touch, B&N drop the price to compete and at the current price this is currently one of the best e-ink reader.

Rooting Guide
Warning: I will not be held responsible for any failure of your Nook while attempting to root it, as with all android rooting there will be some risk that something goes wrong and your device will be unusable. However, I will cover all the necessary steps and preparation that I have personally gone through to root my own Nook, if you follow the guide with some precaution you should be fine, so make sure you understand the whole rooting process before you proceed.



Well, that's the end of my review for this great little e-reader, hope it's helpful and informative.

This post has been edited by El-Prodigy: Dec 31 2011, 07:02 PM