Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber on the B&N Nook Color:

Just watched the demo video in this post (Flash required, alas). The Nook Color is so painfully slow it makes me embarrassed for Barnes and Noble. Horrendous scrolling and zooming and touch responsiveness. Just horrendous.

The video in question can be viewed at CrunchGear. I agree with Gruber: the UI is extremely laggy.

Gizmodo on B&N’s Nook Color:

The new Nook sports a seven inch 1024×600 full-color LCD touchscreen made by LG, accelerometer-enabled for both portrait and landscape orientations. The screen sports a laminated coating that should minimize glare. The pixel density is nice—if you’re comfortable reading books on the iPad, this is better, though in the crappy lighting here it’s hard to judge how awesome the glare-free coating is (or isn’t).

The iPad’s resolution is 131.96 PPI. The Nook Color’s? 169.55 PPI. There is some difference in pixel density but most folks won’t be able to tell the difference between the two. The anti-glare laminated coating should be a big hit on the Nook Color, if it really works without hampering readability.

Engadget‘s Ross Miller on the B&N Nook Color:

While we’re still of the mind that this device should have had a PixelQi or Mirasol display, we can report that the LCD is responsive to finger swipes and the viewing angles are quite good…

The viewing angles better be good; it is an IPS LCD. The Nook Color is running some version of Android so it’ll be hit (2.2) or miss (<2.2) depending on the version.

Wired: Tim Carmody on the Barnes & Noble Nook Color:

But this e-reader gives Google’s OS a bit more of a workout, ditching the low-power, monochrome E Ink display and the two-screen interface of the original Nook.

Instead, it’s got a 7-inch color LCD touchscreen made by LG. The screen technology is called “VividView” and incorporates an anti-glare coating, but is otherwise far closer to a tablet display than an e-book reader like the Kindle.

I would think having two displays would be more taxing on the system. The Nook Color is basically a neutered tablet.

CrunchGear on the B&N Nook Color:

A black-and-white display is fine when you’re reading text-heavy books. You know, histories, biographies, novels, etc. Maybe if you have children and you want an e-reading device a color screen would be worth something to you. You can read Dracula just fine in paperback form, or in black-and-white e-book form. The same probably can’t be said about all those Dr. Seuss books: color is huge there.

It’s not just about color in books: magazines and newspapers are included too. Color can be essential in even text-heavy books like textbooks.

Jim Dalrymple, The Loop via Daring Fireball:

The fact is, Apple already has a 7-inch iPad. They have had one of the smaller devices since they started making the 9.7-inch iPad that we have now.

To be clearer, the two devices were developed at the same time. They have pretty much the same specs, except, of course, the 9.7-inch model has a higher density screen than its smaller counterpart.

Not surprising that Apple already has a 7-inch iPad developed. The part that I’m not so sure about is whether Jim Dalrymple knows what he’s talking about regarding “a higher density screen” on the larger compared to the smaller iPad. Density, to me, is resolution, in other words, pixels per inch or PPI. With Apple marketing the pixel density of its Retina Display on the iPhone 4 it is difficult to miss the definition of display density these days.

The 9.7-inch iPad has a pixel density of 131.96 PPI. And Dalrymple is stating that the smaller 7-inch iPad has less pixel density. Hmm…

Typical 7-inch tablets, like the Samsung Galaxy Tab, has a pixel format of 1024×600. That translates to a pixel density or resolution of 169.55 PPI. That’s quite a bit higher than the larger 9.7-inch iPad.

Is Dalrymple saying that the 7-inch iPad has even less pixels than the Galaxy Tab? If that is what he is saying, he’s most likely wrong.

What probably happened is that Jim Dalrymple didn’t exactly know what the term ‘density’ meant as it relates to displays. You know what I think about the 7-inch iPad? It probably has a higher density screen than the larger counterpart. If I were a betting man, the 7-inch iPad will sport a pixel format of 960×640 or 1024×768.

Digitimes: The HP Zeen is an Android-based tablet PC and is bundled with a printer. The duo was unveiled on October 11th in Taiwan but is not on the market yet. The 7-inch Zeen is endowed with TouchSmart so you can print and manage all of your printing needs. Gmail, Android Market and other multimedia apps have been removed from the Zeen, presumably because it should only be used for print-related stuff. Weird.

Vodafone.de: The price is €730 for a contract-free 16GB Samsung Galaxy Tab from Vodafone Germany. With a new two-year €35 per month data plan the price comes down to €300. Kind of expensive if you ask me.

Akihabara News: Ortustech just outed a 4.8-inch LCD packing 1920×1080 pixels. That translates into a pixel density of 458.94 PPI. These are RGB pixels just like the ones in your notebook, LCD monitor and LCD TV. Viewing angles are 160/160 and the color gamut is 72% NTSC.

The technology used is called Hyper Amorphous Silicon TFT or HAST. Almost all LCDs today use amorphous silicon (a-Si) silicon so the special thing about HAST is that it is ‘hyper’, which represents the technology that allows for so many pixels to be crammed into so little space.

What I’m looking forward to is a smartphone that sports a 3.5- to 4-inch display with a true HD pixel format of 1280×720 or more. I think we are not too far from such a display.

ViewSonic via Digital Signage Today: Reducing bezel thickness is gaining traction. And it should since thick bezels in tiled displays in digital signage applications look terrible. ViewSonic has outed two ultra-slim-bezeled digital signage displays: the 42-inch CD4233 and the 52-inch CD5233.

The bezel is 16.3 mm for the CD4233 and 19.5 mm for the CD5233. Other specs include: 1920×1080 pixel format, 700 cd/m2 brightness, 178-degree viewing angle. The contrast ratio is 4000:1 (static) on the CD5233. MSRPs are US$1899 and $3295.

To compare, the just-announced Samsung 55-inch DIDs have bezels that are much much thinner.

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