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Nook Simple Touch (3) (2011)

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Over the past month I’ve been doing A LOT of reading on my iPad, and while it works great for reading, there are a few issues. One, battery life. If I’m reading pretty constantly during the day, the battery basically lasts the day (about 9-10 hours or so). The second issue, which I never really had until using it for book reading: weight. My iPad, in its case, weighs 832g (about 1.8lbs). That might not seem like a lot, but when you’re holding it for hours a day, it starts to get to you. The iPad 2 is lighter, but I have an iPad 1, and it’s just kinda heavy. It’s not a bad thing, but it does make a difference.

So, last week, I started looking at dedicated eReaders. The Kindle, even the new one, is a travesty of design. It’s awful. It’s big, it’s blocky, it has a hard keyboard, it has dedicated buttons, it’s just, bad. It’s better than the original one, but as an Instructor at work pondered: “At what point does the original design of something become a hinderance to future design?” Basically, was the original so bad, and the designers so unwilling to reset, that the Kindle (or whatever) will always suck. Also, Kindle doesn’t do ePub (which is what I have for the iPad). Anyway, then I looked at the Sony eReaders, and while they’re small, they just didn’t seem right. On the plus side, they are one of the only ones to have a backlight option, but in general, I don’t much care for Sony products (the Playstation(s) being exceptions). So then I remembered about the Nook. Looking online, I saw that B&N had released a new one (the Simple Touch), and it looked great! I headed for the store, and hile at the store, which B&N has obviously seen the writing on the wall, and changed the whole front of their store to be dedicated to the Nook products), a very helpful lady helped me and we had a discussion about why I wanted the Simple Touch vs the Nook Color (basically, because the Nook Color is a smaller iPad. I don’t need another LCD device). And they had the original Nook, but it’s bigger, the eInk isn’t as nice, and while I still think it’s better than the Kindle, it just didn’t appeal. A few hours later, and I was back home with one freshly purchased.

I won’t get into a lot of detail, because that’s already been done here, and here, but I’ll say this: it’s awesome. It weighs in at 210g (or about 1/4th the iPad), and eInk is really a LOT easier on the eyes. The idea of a viewing angle is kind of silly with eInk, in that it’s basically the same as paper. And they do a very nice job with refreshing the page, where it seems to only do a full refresh (the whole screen blanking and returning) whenever enough has changed between pages to warrant it. The Kindle and Sony readers seem to do a full refresh every page turn.

And then there’s battery life. On my iPad, like I said, I get about 9-10 hours. That, for me, means about 300-400 or so pages (I’m a fairly slow reader). My wife has been using the Nook since I bought it, and she’s read over 1200 pages, and the battery is still at 64% (so she should be able to get around 3500 pages per charge). That’s damn near amazing.

I’m all for combined devices. The iPad is a great device in that it does almost everything I could want from a portable computer/tablet. But just as I don’t want to be able to make phone calls on the iPad, I’m not sure I’d want to sit and read a huge book on it (I’ve done it, it’s fine, but it’s not great). The Nook does this amazingly well. And while I can’t browse the web, or read twitter, or whatever on it, it does books, news papers, etc EXTREMELY well. If I was still taking classes, I’d be more than happy to have text books on it. It’s a great little device, and while I didn’t really read any reviews of it until after buying it, I can say it’s damn near perfect. I wouldn’t be surprised if an Ex-Apple designer had a hand in designing it. It’s just extremely well done.

[xrr Rating=5/5]

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

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Friday evening I purchased tickets for Tara and I to see the last Harry Potter movie. After sitting in line for a few hours (I figured I might as well just sit and read), we got to see what 10+ years have built all of us up to. And, I have to say at this point, I’m kind of disappointed.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 was, simply, a bit cheesy. Tara tells me they were all cheesy, but for some reason, this one seemed the most obvious to me. Previous cheesiness could be chalked up to how young the actors were, or the tone of the subject matter, etc. This one, though, was supposed to be epic. It was the climax for everyone. They’d battle it out and that was that. Ignoring the inconsistencies with the book (which were generally minor), the movie just didn’t keep me from thinking “ugh” at some points. Honestly, I’m guessing that’s due to the special/visual effects needed for the battle, but that seems a flimsy excuse when you consider the LoTR movies, and their epic battles. No, this seems like, really, the second half of the book just didn’t translate well to the big screen.

They did some things very well. The things I really liked where the flashback to Snape’s past, the King’s Cross station scene, and how Voldemort kept looking more and more haggard. But outside of that, it seemed that some of the actors just didn’t really show the scale of what they were living. Part One of Deathly Hallows worked. It was slow, because they really did wander around for weeks/months. Their task was really significant, and they had very little to go on. Part Two, though, just didn’t have that scale.

I’m not final on my review, since I’m going to wait until I can watch Part One, and Part Two back to back when the latter arrives on DVD. But for now, alas…

[xrr rating=3.25/5]

X-Men: First Class

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This evening I saw X-Men: First Class, and I have to say, it might be my second favorite Marvel movie to date (the first being Iron Man). Solid acting, good story, decent effects, the whole thing. If you haven’t seen it yet, I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum… but if you REALLY want to avoid them, I’d just skip to the rating.

The movie actually keeps pretty true to the previous movies (even using the footage from X-Men (1) from Magneto’s childhood and him bending the gates. It goes on to show more than that, but the footage appeared to be shot for shot, if not the same actual footage. Later in the movie there’s also a nice cameo from one of the future X-Men (that also doesn’t ruin the timeline). The whole movie was fairly canon to my understanding, though they did veer off a bit in a couple cases (like how Xavier was paralyzed). But they did keep with most things… so the movie felt both like a prequel, and a “reboot”. While my wife hates this take (mainly because she dislikes Christopher Nolan’s style), the line that’s been thrown about a lot with regards to First Class is “Matthew Vaughn did for X-Men what Christopher Nolan did for Batman (in Batman Begins)”. It’s not the different timeline approach like Star Trek, but rather just a different, more serious take.

I really enjoyed X-Men and X-Men 2 when they were released (I prefer to think of X-Men: United having never been made), but they suffered from some of the typical comic book adaptations (mainly cheesy dialog). Sorta like Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. Both of those just seemed forced a lot of the time. One could say the same for Spiderman 3 (another movie I like to think never happened). X-Men: First Class was just a well done movie that felt unforced. It doesn’t hurt that it took place in the past (largely around 1962) so there was never really the infamous technology gaffs movies suffer from (where they hack into something instantly, or claim some technology can do X or Y when it’s not possible, or doesn’t even make sense). That very fact made the movie MUCH more watchable from my mindset. You would think Iron Man would have suffered from this in my mind, but the first one didn’t really have much of that (yes, talking AI computer, theoretically impossible propulsion, etc), but it was never really highlighted. Iron Man 2 on the other hand, while enjoyable (but less so than 1), really suffered from this in part of the movie (inventing a new element).

Bottom line, X-Men: First Class was a highly enjoyable movie (would have been even more so had the theater not been hot/humid, but that’s not the movie’s fault) that I would greatly recommend to anyone who enjoys comic based movies (or just a generally good movie). And as an extra bonus… they DIDN’T shoot it in 3D (or do any crappy post-production “3Dification”). Meaning it didn’t look funky, and I didn’t have to decide which version to see. Long live 2D movies!

[xrr rating=4.75/5]