Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe from pocketnow.com and just recently Amazon released their Kindle app for Android and just today or yesterday by the time you're watching this Barnes & Noble released their Nook Reader for Android so we thought what could we do to find out which one's best well let's get the same book on both and see how they do okay so what I've done is I've gone out to amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com respectively I've set up accounts on both and I've purchased iRobot by Isaac Asimov I thought it was fitting because well this isn't Android and iRobot talks about robots so hey not every ebook that you find is going to be available for Kindle or for Nook so doing a one to one comparison was actually a little bit tricky for me to find a book that was on both of them I'm sure there's an awful lot of overlap but keep that in mind you might have to have an account on both which I'd really like it if there were a unified ebook reader that would read either Kindle or Nook books but that's a topic for another article so let's jump right in since the Kindle app came out first let's take a look at it now I am running Froyo on a nexus one so you can see it launches pretty quickly I added this just a little while ago and you notice that automatically upon starting the app right now I've got a robot in there I haven't opened it I haven't done anything with it but using whisper sink which is Amazon's automatic syncing protocol it's automatically pushed that to my phone so I've not seen how fast this stuff loads so let's go ahead and take a look okay right there we're in the book and it opened right to the introduction page it skipped over the cover the contents the foreword right to the introduction you can see here it's it's pretty good it's pretty quick it's very very readable if I want to jump into anything I can do that by using the go-to I can set a bookmark see how that's done just like that and you can see I've got a little doggie er up here you see if I can zoom in a little bit there I've got a little dog gear up in the corner to show me that this is page marked I don't really like that because doggy entering your pages isn't the best practice for books I'm a hardback fan myself and I don't like it when people dog in my pages so I would like to have seen like a little bookmark icon or something to let me know hey here's here's where your your page is but you know what doggie er works just fine you can see when I scroll to the next page that dog ear stays on the page also I can change my view options change the background color to sepia which is a little bit easier on the eyes change it to white text on black which is a lot better for battery life and I can also adjust the brightness if it'll let me slide this so it won't let me slide but it'll let me tap various positions apparently so I can change the brightness here and that helps with battery life as well so overall not too bad I'm gonna go ahead and remove that bookmark scrolling between the pages is very quick which I like in the Android version a lot more than the actual Kindle version so it does this job it does it pretty well not bad let's go back now and you'll notice down here that it saved the furthest location Kindle will synchronize your bookmarks and your books across many devices so I could go to a Kindle if I actually had a Kindle device and be able to pick up right where I left off reading in my Android phone which is really a cool feature the desktop version as well so next let's jump into nook tap on Nook takes a little bit longer than load or it looks that way a little bit different user interface and you'll notice right down here my robot is in my library but it's not downloaded yet so to do that I actually have to tap download and I'm over Wi-Fi here didn't take too long at all as ebooks are generally relatively small so we'll go ahead and open that now I like to cover on this a lot better the experience looks better and if you notice down at the bottom here we've got this a little stroller to scroll you through the pages so I think that's kind of a neat user interface element it lets you jump through large sections of the book kind of like rifling through the pages of a paperback or a hardback book but let's get to page turning now you might not have seen that let me show you here a little bit slower I can grab here and look at that you see how I've got kind of a page and I can flip it all around here it really looks like I'm turning a page and the same thing goes backwards it looks really nice it's very fluid turning the pages is just as fast here as it is and I can go through really quick if I want to without much animation at all but if I just kind of want to leisurely turn the pages I can do that I like that a lot more than I do on the Kindle app and it really surprised me now you'll notice up here a little plus sign you tap on that and it'll dog-ear that that I assume is there bookmark feature so if we go to look at bookmarks sure enough but mark page five just by tapping on that again I don't really like the dog-ear user interface if you will I'd much rather have a little bookmark coming over the top but they both handle it the same way that having been said this book cost me a little bit more on Barnes & Noble than it did on an Amazon for Kindle so I actually ended up buying the book twice that to me is a problem I bought the book I should have the book it just goes without saying I would really like to see hardback books especially hardback come with a digital copy that you can just write there you've got it you can scan a barcode you can type in a code at Barnes and noble.com and now you have access to the digital copy of the book in addition to the paperback I don't know how they do the page syncing hardback - digital version but that another technology altogether now as I understand it if I want to synchronize where I am here I have to push either that sync button or that sync button it doesn't look to me like it automatically syncs though I could be wrong which might be okay you know if you don't want to sync stuff up you have control over your synchronizing whereas on the Kindle app it automatically syncs for you there's something to be said for each method both apps as you can see have a relatively good user interface I happen to like the way the Nook lays out your library a little bit better than the way the Kindle app does but both of them if you go to shop for ebooks immediately kick you over to the website so I don't necessarily like that I'd like to have some kind of a store inside the app rather than having to go to a mobile version of the web but you know that's just me you know if I wanted this I could go ahead and tap to buy now and as long as I have my credentials saved in the web browser for in this case Barnes & Noble it'll automatically deduct that amount from my credit card and I'm good to go but if I want to go back to here I've already got that saved here and the same thing goes with Kindle I've got my credentials my username and password saved in the app it doesn't pass that over to the web browser and it shouldn't because they're separate apps but it makes for kind of a disjointed user user experience and I don't really like that however if I'm gonna be buying these books I'd really like to buy them on my desktop computer on a really big version of the website and then just have it automatically synchronized with my phone and they both did that very well so overall the Amazon Kindle I really like the Amazon Web Store a lot better than the Barnes & Noble web store I'm there a lot more but the Kindle app isn't quite as good as the Nook app in my opinion and most of that comes from this page animation and the ability to just very quickly rifle through the pages using that scroller on the bottom so I want to know what do you think which ebook reader do you like is a nook or is it Kindle or is it another one go ahead and leave me comments down below this video if you've got one that you really want us to review let me know that too if you've had a different experience with Nook or with with Kindle I want to know that as well if you liked the video give it a thumbs up if you like reading books on your phone thumbs up as well of course to stay up to date with everything having to do with smartphones and the mobile lifestyle you'll want to subscribe to our youtube channel and showing you the difference between the Nook and Kindle apps for Android I'm Joe for pocketnow.com