What does 1.5 add? Well, as the press release states they’ve added support for organizing books in your Barnes & Noble library. That means anything on your nook can be added to Shelves that you create and name. The shelves can be turned on and off, and they show up as named lists on the screen. This feature works both in your B&N Library and the My Documents content you add manually.
It’s not as clean a look at the Kindle’s Collections feature, since you start out looking at the contents of a shelf rather than a high-level list of your shelves, but it serves the same purpose.
They’ve also added the ability to set a password for purchases, which makes the Nook a little safer for folks who lend it out (either to other people or their kids). I’ll probably do this just to prevent myself from making impulse buys quite so often.
The most noticeable improvement for me with 1.5 is page turn speed. I noticed when moving from the Kindle 2 to the Nook how much slower the Nook was when turning pages. Whereas the Kindle was mostly instantaneous, the 1.3 firmware Nook took about 2-3 seconds between the time I pressed the next button (or swiped the touchpad) and when I saw a new page.
This wasn’t a deal-breaker for me, since I tend to read with small fonts, but my wife bumps her fonts up much larger, so there’s less to read on a page and those 2-3 second pauses in the middle of a sentence can be jarring.
Thankfully, the 1.5 update fixed this. My nook is now every bit as snappy as my Kindle 2, and pages show up almost instantaneously. I find this interesting, because it proves that the Nook hardware was perfectly capable of near-instant page turns all along.
The Nook still isn’t perfect, but it has improved considerably with this firmware release. Here are my suggestions for firmware update 1.6:
- Merge the My Documents and My B&N Library sections so that we can have cover flow-like browsing on books we load ourselves (sideloaded content). The Nook shouldn’t care where the ePUB files come from.
- Add the option of a high-level view for my shelves. I want to see a clean screen with just my shelf names. Let me decide which one I want to drill down into. This is something Amazon got right the first time.
If you’re not a Nook owner yet, there are several stores offering the wifi-only version for $99 over the Thanksgiving holidays. I imagine those kinds of sales will continue on through Christmas.
I should note that I was a little disappointed at the difficulty I had getting my Nooks updated. Neither of our wifi Nooks would take the 1.5 update over wireless. They would see there was an update, try to download it, and then throw an error.
Also, I couldn’t find a clear text-based guide on how to manually install the update. There’s a video tutorial here, but let me outline it for the bandwidth-challenged:
- Download the firmware file (it’s called signed_bravo_update.dat) from here.
- Plug your Nook into your computer with the USB cable.
- Once it’s available as a removable drive, drag the .DAT file to the top directory of your Nook, not a folder. I stuck mine in My Documents the first time and it didn’t work.
- Eject your Nook from your computer and wait.
- You should see a tiny rectangle on the bottom right corner of your Nook screen with some percentages. It’s preparing the update.
- Wait. On our Nooks it took about 5 minutes for the update to fully take. During that time your screen will flicker and you’ll see some interesting black-and-white messages about Android and mounting file systems on the LCD screen. This is normal.
- Once you see the familiar Device is starting up screen you’re pretty much done. Just let it boot and enjoy your faster page turns and collections.
I’ve also discovered quite by accident that I finally have the ability to delete books I sideloaded from the Nook without having to plug it into a computer. This is a welcome improvement, and one that I’ve requested and seen requested often. Kudos to Barnes & Noble for listening to feedback!
