Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch

Despite the proliferation of tablets in the market today and the number of people gobbling up these devices off the shelves, there still is a certain portion of the population that doesn’t care much for these devices and their offerings and would rather stick to a plain, old e-reader for their reading needs. This is where the Nook Simple Touch from Barnes & Noble excels and the simplicity that this device packs is what makes it even more attractive.

Compared to the first iteration of the Nook, the Nook Simple Touch is shorter and narrower with its dimensions of 170 x 130 x 12 mm. The device is also a featherweight as it tipped the scales at only 212 grams. These measurements of the Nook Simple Touch make it very easy for someone to slip the eReader in a bag or a jacket pocket for that matter.

The back panel of the Nook Simple Touch with its matte black finish is molded and is designed in such a way that it will fit your hands very nicely for a more comfortable reading session. The front panel of the eReader on the other hand features a small “n” button right below the display while the buttons on either side of the display are used for turning pages. The power button of the Nook Simple Touch is found at the upper portion of its back panel while a micro-USB port resides at the bottom edge of the device. A microSD card slot on the other hand can be found on its right flank.

Despite being a plain, old eReader, the innards of the Nook Simple Touch make it seem like a tablet given the fact that it packs an SoC chipset under the hood. A Texas Instruments OMAP3621 chipset resides in the circuitry of the Nook Simple Touch and gives the eReader an ARM Cortex-A8 processor with a clock speed of 8000 MHz in addition to a PowerVR SGX530 GPU. 256 MB of RAM supports the processor of the device while its 2GB of onboard storage can hold up to 1,000 books. You can even add an additional 32GB of external memory by using the device’s dedicated memory expansion slot.

As for its display, the Nook Simple Touch sports a 6-inch touchscreen E-Ink Pearl Display with a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels. The display also has a 16-level grayscale which leads to greater detail and exceptional sunlight legibility so you can read to your heart’s content even under direct sunlight. Not only does the Nook Simple Touch feature adjustable text with 6 different font styles and 7 font sizes, it also makes use of Best-Text Technology which basically optimizes the letters on the display of incredibly crisp words. The power generated by the combination of the processor and RAM of the Nook Simple Touch on the other hand work well with the device’s touchscreen where page turns are on the eReader are 25% faster than the competition. This also leads to 80% less full page refresh on the Nook Simple Touch as opposed to other eReaders.

If you’re in the market for a budget eReader, nothing beats the Nook Simple Touch at the moment. It gives you an unparalleled reading experience and its battery life of up to 2 months lets you read for an hour a day for the next 60 days.  And with its very reasonable price tag of just $99, the Nook Simple Touch may as well be the best eReader available in the market today.

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