Kindle Fire

It sounds wonderful.  It's less expensive than the Nook Color by about $50, being priced at $199.  It sounds more powerful and the screen looks designed to be very sturdy.  The Nook Color 2 will be released soon and is built on a newer generation of Android ie Gingerbread and I have no idea what else that offers.

What seems to be going unremarked upon is that there is a $79 Kindle for sale, too.  So while a Kindle Tab is exciting with streaming vid and cloud computing, and dual core whatever, for the general, not techy, public, $80 for a reader coming into the Christmas season?  This is the great news for writers.

They say the battery life is about 8 hours.  I think that's what the NC is too and it probably is but it sure seems like less.  The LED screen is the issue.  It requires a ton of power to run the thing and the more you do--like play Angry Birds--you can see the battery run down to 50% in no time.

I haven't seen the Fire's screen, almost no one has, and it's said to be beautiful, but I have to say the NC screen is gorgeous.

I haven't been reading that much in the past weeks, not since being disappointed by The Magician Kings or whatever the title was, so that also means I haven't taken the time to explore all the functionality of the rooted Nook.  I suspect it does everything I want it to do.

What needs to happen--sorry Mr Bezos--is for Amazon to drop the dopey mobi format and adopt epub.  Let's get a standard, like Beta vs. VHS.