So I bought my wife a Nook Touch this morning. She’s out running errands right now and it’s sitting there charging. I can’t wait for her to find it when she gets home and see it sitting on top of her nook color.

I can’t wait for her to get it because one of her favorite things to do during this horrendous heat wave has been to get a glass of wine, settle into a shady bench in the pool, and read her nook color. It’s something she really enjoys so she can get the most out of that experience.  Being married to me, you know she deserves it.  The Nook Color’s screen is readable outside, but not easily so.

I like the Kindle (a lot) , but we’ve become a nook family for a couple of reasons. I’m not trying to start any sort of holy war – to each their own. For me and mine, though, here’s a quick top 10 list of the reasons why we are currently happy nook customers.

2- I’m not a fan of DRM – but the DRM in the nook is tolerable. It’s quiet, unobtrusive, and is becoming ubiquitous.  B&N has made it easy for me to not have to strip the DRM from my eBooks for fair use purposes. This is not a commentary on DRM, though.

3- The B&N model and their support / coordination with public libraries holds a special place in my heart.  I spent a great deal of my youth in libraries.  Kindle will soon / recently announced public library support, which is awesome.  I know that if I were to donate my nooks to someone, they can get books in ways other than buying or having them lent to them. 
Also, B&N have brick and mortar stores. Not only does this give you a place to go for customer service, but the stores have WiFi in them and if you are in the store using your Nook there are books get to read while there for free. Did I forget that there’s usually a Starbucks in there?

4- The Nook devices run Android and I will soon be able to write apps specifically for the Nook. I know the new Amazon tablets are coming – but the nook is there today.  I like to support the Android ecosystem.

5- I *really* like the Nook Touch because it is _very_ light and the eInk touch screen is surprisingly responsive. I had read that it was sort of sluggish – but I think for most people it’ll be just fine. I didn’t find it slow at all.

6- I love the size of the Nook Touch. There’s no hard keyboard, so for some people that may be a drawback. My wife won’t buy a smart phone if it’s not a slider; but she’s been happy with the keyboard on her Nook Color. In her words "Its a reader, I don’t use email on it".  The Nook Touch has an on-screen keyboard and "paddle buttons" (for lack of a better word) on the sides which make turning a page as simple a squeezing it. If you move your thumb down and squeeze it, it turns back a page.
This is *damn* handy if your other hand is busy with a leash, cocktail, on the other side of your body (when laying face down), or underwater. User experience FTW.

7- There is a nook with 3G, but we’ve not missed having it in our Nook Color.  Many months and a long vacation later, the 3G seems like a luxury not a must have. WiFi is almost everywhere I go now.  Plus my phone is a hotspot, so it just seems redundant. I have a Galaxy Tab with a data plan and I wish I’d just bought the Tab WiFi only. Seriously – I only enable the Wifi when I’m too lazy to fire up my hotspot or my phone battery is too low.  That happens about twice a month, so cost / benefit (for me) says no.

8- No advertisements. I’m sure they’re useful – but I sort of cringe at being enthralled as a small, outnumbered group of rebels hide behind one of Saturn’s moons while the Federated Fleet is about to ( YOU CAN GET $50 OFF COOKING LESSONS ON THURSDAY)..  I’m sure it’s not that invasive, but I don’t want advertisements native to my devices.  Ever. They may be in an app, but that’s different.
I don’t like where Amazon is headed with this.. Just sayin’….

9- They’re claiming two months of battery life on the nook touch, and that remains to be seen. My wife charges her Nook Color occasionally but she is an *avid* reader. The Nook Color feels like a batter pack with a screen The Nook Touch feels much lighter. This is a state of the art device with state of the art battery technology, so I expect it to be good and the reviews say its good but there are reports of units with bad batteries.

10- It’s competitive, so you don’t really loose much using either of the leading eReaders.  The number of available books you can buy is about the same, and the devices cost about the same. The Nook Touch is $139 while the Kindle with Special Offers is $114. You can dump the ads for the 6 inch Kindle by paying $139.  
The Nook Touch doesn’t have sound – which is a difference some may care about and keep in mind if you’ve not bought an eReader.
For the most part, the books cost about the same and the have a similar volume of titles.

In my opinion, which eReader you might want will come down to what you want out of it. Play with them all, find the one that fits your hand, lifestyle, and pocketbook.

Bonus Round:
This is *not* for all users, but you can root a nook and put the *ahem* Kindle Reader Android App on it. It doesn’t redraw the screen very efficiently from what I’ve seen online. However, if one were so inclined you could have both in one.

I wonder if I’ll be able to install the nook Android app on the new Amazon tablets that are coming out?

So Google+ slipped out onto the Internet.

Then, LifeHacker posted a Google+ invite thread to Facebook.  So I went over to the thread and got swept up I the enthusiasm of trying to get invites. I registered on LifeHacker and posted but because I had just signed up I couldn’t get in. People were posting that they were in, then people would reply with their email. The whole point of the thread was to give a forum for people to pay it forward.

So I went all guerrilla and started watching for people who’d just got in and who where paying it forward. They’d post “Got in! Hey thanks whoever” so I’d go back in the thread and find their request. Once I found that, I would email them asking for the invite. I kept my email polite and short – explaining that because I had just signed up I couldn’t request and to please invite me.

Finally – someone invited me and I was in.

At first, I didn’t know what to do. It seemed familiar to me, and the Google+ black toolbar hovered patiently as I poked and prodded the site. Some features made sense to me, like Circles. Others, like Sparks, seemed counter intuitive. But the biggest thing that stuck out to me was it was very quiet. Like some big city that had been built in the middle of China but nobody lived there yet.

Then it exploded for me. I started small, with the mobile G+ app on my phone. Then I started participating in discussions. Then I got to do a face to face video chat with Michael Dell while he flew to California.

I realized this wasn’t like Facebook at all, and I had to stop thinking like it was. This was something entirely different and new. A completely different perspective and approach. Suddenly, Facebook felt, frankly, like a small network of friends. Google+ felt like I was “outdoors”. What I feel is missing from Google+ is the feeling of my friends being outside with me. Maybe that will come as more join in and start using it. Some, I fear, won’t want to bother with leaving Facebook. And that’s ok – I don’t mind.

Now – hours upon hours later – after streams and streams of jokes, links, laughter, controversy, discovery, and contribution – I am hooked. And I don’t mean “hey this is cool, hooked”, I mean “for the love of Twinkie stuffing, this is sucking every bit of productivity out of me”.

This feels like the Internet has changed from a quiet, sterile world of darkness with lights of data to be accessed to a bustling city of activity teaming with life.  It’s a uniquely social and personal experience all at once.

In a discussion with a total stranger, I summarized it as follows. For reference, many people on Google+ refer to it as G+.

Facebook is like living in a small town with a population just big enough where you don’t know everybody, but you have a pretty large circle of friends. Everybody knows who know everybody else is, who are friends and who aren’t. Every bit of detail is just there. And on every corner there’s a carnival barker, a preacher, a distant relative who’s codependent, and someone follows you around all day writing down everything you do and shares it with the carnival barker. Oh, and if you joke with a friend about some hot member of the opposite sex, your Grandmother starts putting scripture in front of her house.

G+ is like you are a stranger walking through a great big, busy marketplace. You don’t know anyone and they don’t know you. Everyone is trading information and breaking off into groups and discussing, laughing, and clapping. In random parts of this bazaar, you have people ( say+Michael Dell or +Kelly Ellis ) who are talking, sharing, and pinning up pictures on boards. They have people who take what they chose to share and they bring it you; but only what they want you to share. They may share dinner plans, also – but not with you. And you do the same thing. Your Grandmother might be in this marketplace also – but she’s in a circle called family. So when you start talking about that hot member of the opposite sex, you just leave that circle of people out of the conversation. They never knew it took place. Oh, and you can hold that circle of friends to secrecy by not letting them share it with just a click of the button.

Frankly – there are so many places for you to find details about Google+ that my sharing them here would be redundant and unnecessary.  I’m anxious for the Google team, who are right there in the middle of the mass of activity, to feel comfortable enough to open Google+ up to the world.  I’ve tried to describe my experience with Google+ in so many ways. Here are some other attempts, maybe you are a Google+ user and you agree? Maybe you soon will be and will feel completely different. For me, I feel like I found an online home that I actually care about.

For the love of all creamy stuff Twinkies – G+ is a productivity singularity.

 

G+ is like crack. They took the jubilant mayhem of IRC, the personal intimacy of Facebook, the democratic participation of forums, their Internet app suite of online offerings, the planar equalization of twitter, and they mixed it up in a dynamic UI that (at least while using Chrome, it seems) feels anything but like the web.

This feels like a tectonic shift in how I will use the Internet. This corner of the Internet just became a crowded, busy marketplace instead of a quiet temple. When search becomes fully integrated and the API opens up so people & organizations can “plus” their websites (adding forums, members, sparks, etc.), it’ll just grow.
G+ turned a sterile library of data into a Rave.

 

Something I love about G+. When Google opens up invites, you get all these new people – and when you read their comments on discussions they say things like “it’s so clean!” & “this is amazing” & “Wow++”. And I think to myself “I’m right there with you, I’m so glad you get it, too.”

 

Damn but G+ sucks you in -

I hope to see you all there very soon.

Traditionally, to rid these apps off your phone, you’d need to gain root level access to the phone’s operating system (referred to as “rooting” your phone).  Rooting your Android phone allows you customize many features of your phone and do thing that are not generally allowed by the carrier. Some people abuse rooting to copy software or turn their phone into a Wi-Fi hotspot without paying for the ability to do so.

Thus, only “rooted” users could uninstall these apps.

Sprint, however, has listened to it’s customers and has announced that they will enable the remove of pre-installed apps on future Android phones.  This is awesome news. This will result in better battery life, better UI responsiveness, and more of a sense of ownership for the users. Who will now have the ability to streamline their phone to their liking.

I’ve sent my HP in to get it serviced. That didn’t solve it, obviously.

So, I tweeted a bit of free advice to anyone to avoid HP.  Basically, it’s my only way of giving HP the finger for the mistake I made, but sometimes I just get pissed off.

Now, if you put a gun to my head and ask me what brand of enterprise server I’d recommend? HP all the way.  Other than that – not so much.

Of course, my tweet lands on Facebook and I’m immediately told I should buy a MacBook. As I replied, been there; done that. In face, I bought my first Apple computer in 1985. My bulky Apple IIe had (*gasp*) expansion slots.  The Lisa was a hulking machine the size of a beer fridge in the corner with an 8 inch screen at the Apple store.

Since it’s incomprehensible to some people that I actually do not prefer Macs; I had to beat back the zealots off the front porch and get that out of the way.  I’ve owned the absolute top of the line MacBook Pro and frankly, the novelty wore off after a few months.

Then, a distant friend asked an extremely good question. She asked:

So if you don’t want to spend 2K for a Mac what is the next best thing? Macs are great but pretty expensive on a grad student’s budget.

Well, Jennifer, I thought I’d post this up just in case someone else was asking the same thing.  So here’s some free consulting.

First – if you like Macs, you can get a great deal on a Mac online or used.  If you’re buying a used Mac off Craigslist or something – I recommend making an appointment to meet the seller at a mac store and have a Mac genius (their customer service rep) make sure the laptop is in good working order.  You can get a new MacBook for around $1000, if that’s within your budget. Be careful when buying a used MacBook that you don’t buy an extremely old one that has the PowerPC CPU. Make sure it has an Intel CPU.

If you prefer Windows because you like Microsoft Office, if I may make a strong suggestion to you. Try Office alternatives, like LibreOffice. Try it, you have nothing to lose because it is FREE. It produces documents compatible with Microsoft Office, also. So if your professor says he wants documents in Microsoft Word format, you can accomplish this with LibreOffice.

You can run LibreOffice on the Mac, also.

Down to the nuts and bolts, though.

Squaretrade recently released a study on laptop reliability. They analyzed failure rates for over 30,000 new laptops and studied the failure rate over three years.

Here’s a chart from the study:

You may not have heard of Asus, but they’ve been around a very long time. Back in the pre-Internet days, Asus made some of the best “clone PC” components you could buy.  I first encountered Asus because they made a very reliable, relatively inexpensive 3.5” floppy drive.

Asus makes what I like to call “high value” laptops. Not cheap, because there is always less expensive. High value because their pricing is good and based on this study, they’re very reliable. These are important factors if your shopping for a deal on a laptop.

As well, you could buy a netbook. A netbook may work for you – but you should go to a computer retailer and work with one before ordering one online; or borrow one from a friend. They’re traditionally very small and underpowered for anything other than browsing the web, checking email, or watching an occasional you tube video.  One major plus is their weight. Netbooks are ultra-portable. So if the miniature keyboard isn’t a deal killer for you, maybe it’d work for you!

So, we come to the Asus laptops.  They come in many shapes and sizes. In fact, a friend of mine recently bought a new Asus laptop that he tricked out with 16GB of RAM and dual SSD hard drives in Raid 0! It was expensive and extremely fast. However, those specifications are unattainable in the MacBook Pro world.

Most of the time, though, our measuring stick for a new laptop is our budget.

I’m not taking into consideration if the laptop comes with Microsoft Office. If you are a student, you can get a student edition at a huge discount. If you are not, I recommend trying LibreOffice first. Then if you still want Microsoft Office, don’t buy it bundled with a laptop because if you do, you can only use that copy of Office with that computer. If you spend the extra money and buy office separately, if you upgrade your computer you can legally install your copy on your new computer. Never mind you can buy upgrade editions moving forward.

To get the best deal on a laptop, you almost always have to go online. However, you also might want to think about what happens if something goes wrong? Buying a laptop from Walmart isn’t necessarily a bad idea if they’re the only retailer where you live. They have a liberal exchange policy. So paying a little extra for a laptop from Walmart.com may pay off if you have an issue. Remember to put a good backup plan in place (see the end of this post).  Knowing ahead of time what to do and what to expect if something goes wrong with your laptop will spare you a lot of frustration and panic.  If you know you have a good backup and take your laptop into a local retailer and swap it out, that should provide some comfort. If you know you’re going to have to ship your laptop somewhere and it’s going to take a week to get it back, that also should help calm the situation.  Know ahead of time what the repair experience will be like as best you can. This is extremely important regardless of what computer you buy. Some questions to ask:

• How long is my warranty?
• What does my warranty cover?
• If my computer has a hardware problem, how quickly can it be repaired?
• Will the reseller / retailer swap my laptop out for a new one if it breaks?
• What is the exchange policy for my laptop?
• Can I upgrade my laptop in the future to extend its life?

So broken down into three budget groups, here are some suggestions. (Amazon links use my affiliate information, so if you buy from Amazon I’d sure appreciate it if you used one of these links to do so).

Around $500.00

For around $630.00, you can get an Asus laptop on Amazon.com. It weighs 8.4 pounds and has an Intel i5 CPU (which is a current generation of CPU). It comes with 4 GB of RAM, can play back 720p HD content. It has HDMI out so you can use an HDTV in house as a big monitor if you need one. It’s screen is only 15.6” in size, so it is on the small size.  It has built in wireless so you can use it at your favorite coffee shop, a built in webcam for chatting with family or embedding video into a presentation, and a 4 in 1 media card reader so you can get files off your digital camera.

As a nice to have, it comes with a Blu-ray drive. So you can watch movies on Blu-ray discs when traveling or read Blu-ray data discs. The disk is also a CD Burner so you can use it for backing up your data.

This is the a great, bang for the buck, laptop.

For around $400.00 you can get this Asus laptop.  It comes with an old processor / cpu (Pentium Dual-Core 2.13Ghz). It has 4GB of RAM, a 320GB Hard drive, a DVD Burner, and Windows 7.  Not bad for the price.  The extra couple hundred bucks for the previous laptop will buy you much more performance and life. This laptop may last you a while but because it is based on older technology.  You may be wishing you’d spend the extra money in a year or two.

This one is similar and lists for $550. It has a faster CPU and more disk space. It also is a 15.6” display.  It comes with “palm proof” technology which knows if your palm accidentally hits the touch pad and thus prevents the cursor from moving while typing. If you do a lot of typing on the go, this would be a huge plus.

Around $1000

If you have a budget in this range, you could consider a MacBook (see above). You can get a MacBook for $999.00 at Apple’s online store. It’s got great specs, would make a great laptop for almost anyone!   Know where your nearest Apple retailer is in case you have problems. If your MacBook has an issue, you should go to Apple to get it fixed.  Here is the Apple service FAQ.

If not, here’s a nice model in this budget range from ASUS.

For $998.00 at Walmart.com, you can get your hands on a very nice Asus laptop.  This same laptop is $1061.79 at amazon.com.. This is an extremely capable laptop for the money.  It comes with an Intel i7 CPU (Current Generation & higher end), a 750 GB hard drive, a USB 3.0 port (which is very fast so very good for backing up data), Bluetooth, a 5 in 1 card reader, and wifi.  It also comes with video editing software which might be good for presentations or doing a video from your last vacation. It doesn’t have Blue-Ray, if that’s important to you.

Around $1500

If you want to spend the money, here’s a $1647.00 Asus laptop with loads of horsepower, features, and bang for the buck.  It’s the most popular Asus laptop on Google Shopping.  All the CPU you need, 1TB of hybrid HDD/SSD storage (1000 GB), 3D Graphics card, 8GB of memory, Blu-ray, and a 17.3 inch screen. It’s big. It’s fast. It’s heavy. A similarly equipped MacBook Pro would be over $2500 ($2699.00 to be exact).

This would replace a desktop computer.

BACKUP YOUR DATA

Backing up your data is *always* a good idea. It’s doubly so when buying bargain priced laptops. Anything can happen, even with the most reliable of laptops.

Hands down – head and shoulders, my recommendation is CrashPlan. Yes, that’s an affiliate link, too. I use it myself. It works. It’s stable and doesn’t drag down my PC. It works on Server OSs. They have a business version if you own a business and are looking for an off-site backup solution.

Crashplan works with Windows, Macs, and Linux.

First of all, it’s free to backup to your friends or family or to an external hard drive. The idea is you let your friend backup to your computer and you backup to theirs. Or, if you have two computers, have them backup to each other. That’s not what I do, though. I use CrashPlan Family Unlimited.  For $120.00 a year, you can backup EVERYTHING for up to 10 computers online. Unlimited storage – for the *entire family*. They don’t have to all live in the same home, either.

Worst case, spend a little money to buy an external USB hard drive and backup your data to that every night or whatever makes sense for you. You can setup CrashPlan to backup to the USB HD every night, and it will try. If you turn off the computer or don’t plug in the drive, it won’t back up. But this way, when you want a backup, all you need to do is leave the computer on overnight with your external hard drive plugged in.

It’ll protect you if your computer crashes or the HDD stops working; but if you have an event that destroys your home your data could be lost forever. So you might want to consider buying online storage or backing up to a friend you trust.

Hope this helps someone, good luck and enjoy your new laptop!

Rumors are flying that Amazon may be getting ready to get into the tablet pool. Not content to wade into the shallow end, it looks like Amazon may be going right for the high-dive.  And I love it.

BGR received a tip that Amazon is prepping a dual core and a quad core tablet for 2011.  Reportedly, Amazon’s two devices are code named Coyote and Hollywood.

The Coyote device is suspected to have the NVidia Tegra 2 at it’s core and will be the “entry” level Amazon tablet.

The Hollywood, however, may have the NVIdia T30 “Kal-El” which is a quad core processor and provides a 500% increase in performance over the Tegra 2.

We’re not playing around here kids.  That is some serious power in the form of a tablet. With that kind of CPU power, these tablets would be capable of performing the most rigorous computing tasks.

Web based services like Google Docs would perform more than adequately on such a device.

However, I suspect all this CPU power will have another purpose.  I believe that Amazon has Netflix and Apple squarely in their crosshairs.  With a quad core CPU, the larger tablet could be an incredible multi-media powerhouse.

Amazon recently opened their own Android market, and by launching their own tablets, they would clearly draw a line in the digital sand. Amazon has a streaming movie service and they’re digital downloads include music unencumbered with draconian DRM.

In my opinion, Amazon is marking their territory. Additionally, they may be establishing a digital ecosystem that could rival Apple’s.

The Amazon ecosystem based on Android will have:

• Digital Content (Movies, Music, Books, More)
• Consumer Goods (Furniture, Clothing, Electronics, More)
• Private App Market (A Private app market under their quality control)
• HUGE brand recognition (Amazon is a household name and a trusted online retailer)
• Broad support because they exist *on* an open platform

Considering Android marketplace is about to surpass Apple’s in terms of available applications and Android is now the largest smartphone platform in the world, will Apple’s strictly defined experience be enough?