Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader: $260, color touchscreen, pre-order now

Someone over on the Barnes & Noble web team seems to have jumped the gun, because the official Nook site was up for a few minutes, before quickly being pulled down. Luckily, we were able to get in, and even pre-order a unit, before things got pulled. The B&N Nook e-reader runs Android, and looks like it’ll give the Amazon Kindle a run for its money.

The device features a 6-inch screen, with a 3.5-inch color touchscreen beneath it. This gives you a quick method to browse your library, the store, and input text into the device. Definitely much easier than the Kindle’s hard keyboard. The device measures in at 7.7 x 4.9 x 0.5-inches, and weighs 11.2 ounces. You get 10 days of battery life if you turn off wireless, and the battery takes 3.5 hours to go from empty to full when plugged into a wall outlet. Speaking of wireless, the Nook actually sports both a 3G connection from AT&T, as well as built-in Wi-Fi 802.11b/g. Definitely an advantage over the Kindle, because even if you have poor cell reception, you can just connect to Wi-Fi to download a book. The Nook also includes 2GB of internal storage (enough to hold 1500 books,) a microSD slot for adding even more storage, MP3 playback, built-in speaker, headphone jack, and micro USB port for charging and syncing.

So, aside from the above, what sets this thing apart from the Kindle? For starters, you can lend books to friends for up to two weeks at a time, and they don’t even need a Nook of their own. They can access the Nook book content on an iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry, PC, or Mac. The lending of literature is one thing that went away with the Kindle, and we are happy to see it return with Nook. The Barnes & Noble store also has over a million titles available for download, with more than 500,000 of those being free ebooks. The Nook can also read PDFs, something the Kindle 2 can’t do.

The Barnes & Noble Nook is available now for pre-order.

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