Barnes & Noble’s new NOOK tries to please everybody (however it might’t faux E Ink)

This St. Patrick’s Day, Barnes & Noble is making an attempt to toss just a little luck into its tech line. The key bookseller is launching its new 8.7-inch NOOK Studying Pill on March 17, full with Android 15, 64GB of storage, a coloration show, and a set of built-in studying modes. It feels like the subsequent refreshing e-reader second — that’s, till you understand that the show is an IPS LCD panel.

It is not precisely the machine that e-reader lovers have been asking for — particularly the devoted NOOK customers ready on an actual E Ink comeback. The GlowLight 4 Plus did arrive in 2023, nevertheless it wasn’t the generational gamechanger that would’ve pulled followers away from Kindle or Kobo.

With its new NOOK Studying Pill 8.7, Barnes & Noble is hedging to please everybody. What it could truly do is isolate a vital group of individuals within the studying world: E Ink loyalists.

What’s the NOOK Studying Pill 8.7?

Specs and hypothesis

You’ll be able to preorder Barnes and Noble’s new NOOK for $150. It is going to be obtainable in two colours at launch: Seafoam Inexperienced and Luna Gray.

With a multitouch IPS LCD display screen, the brand new NOOK is a standard, backlit pill with as much as 400 nits of brightness (some studies peg it increased) and eight.7 inches of display screen actual property. It runs Android 15 with the NOOK Pill expertise and gives as much as 16.5 hours of battery life — a consequence of its LCD display screen. E Ink units, then again, do not devour practically as a lot energy.

Despite the fact that the display screen is not E Ink, the NOOK Studying Pill 8.7 boasts built-in Studying Modes — Grayscale, Chromatic, and Immersive — to convey the show as shut as potential to it. So, when you aren’t studying one thing colourful (say, a graphic novel), you’ll be able to dial again the colours to one thing a bit calmer. Nevertheless it’s nonetheless a LCD display screen, and Barnes & Noble cannot deny that.

Clearly, the NOOK Studying Pill is not precisely your run-of-the-mill e-reader. It runs Android 15 (and the NOOK Pill expertise), so customers can entry the Google Play Retailer and obtain varied apps. The colour capabilities will not prohibit readers to simply conventional e-books, inviting magazines, manga, and extra to the expertise. The pill additionally sports activities a back and front digicam, which positively is not a function on Kindle or Kobo e-readers.

Barnes & Noble is making an attempt to please everybody

As an alternative of committing to 1 lane

Barnes & Noble is making an attempt to push this machine onto readers’ desks, nevertheless it’s a pill carrying an e-reader’s clothes. The elemental enchantment of e-readers is their distraction-free nature, which avoids any probability of steering you away from the ebook in your arms. If something, this NOOK feels extra like Amazon’s Kindle Fireplace than a devoted studying device in any respect. When a “studying machine” begins including bells and whistles that invite different actions into the equation, it renounces its devoted “studying” objective.

Moreover, it is necessary to notice that Barnes & Noble sidestepped the E Ink show that competitors like Kindle and Kobo are identified for, leaving readers itching for a paper-like show hanging but once more. E Ink is standard due to its seemingly eternal battery life, ease on the eyes, and improbable mimicry of actual paper — to not point out, slower refreshes that really make you decelerate with out shedding any momentum in your studying session.

Barnes & Noble ought to’ve given the NOOK GlowLight E Ink line a well-deserved refresh as a substitute. Completed proper, an improve may’ve made a dent within the grip Kindle and Kobo have on the e-reader market.

However for now, at $150, the NOOK Studying Pill 8.7 is a tool that does just a little little bit of every little thing for a very good worth. However “jack of all trades, grasp of none” is what’s going to hold Barnes & Noble from gaining any actual floor within the e-reader house.