Continuing with my big fondle tour of yesterday, I tried to do: Kindle Touch, Nook Touch (again), and — finally! — a Kobo Touch.
So… what happened?
I encountered the Kindle Touch at Staples. It was complaining of a low battery (not photographed). So was the nearby Nook Touch, which couldn’t even be powered on!
I had to coax it out of Demo Mode. I opened a book and my suspicions were confirmed as far as the touch regions go: If I held it in my right hand, my thumb couldn’t stretch all the way to the left to tap the Previous Page region.
As it was, I was shocked at how slow the page refresh was on the Kindle Touch. Is it like that with units people have bought too?
I had to go to a Barnes & Noble to try the Nook Touch again. I mainly had two goals: to try 1.1 on a unit not in demo mode (peers at Staples) and to look at a specific eBook.
The 1.1 page refresh on the Nook Touch just kills what I saw on the Kindle Touch. Barnes & Noble is really doing a good job.
But there was a weird inconsistency between the behavior of the Nook Touch and the Nook Tablet:
I really wanted to see what the formatting of Stephen King’s latest book — 11/22/63 — was like on the Nook Touch, especially since the Nook Touch has publisher default override.
But I couldn’t. On the Nook Tablet, I could download a Sample of the book. On the Nook Touch, only Read In Store was available! And when I tried that, I got this:
Maybe the demo units aren’t set up for that or I had a bad one. I didn’t try another one. I’ll have to try again another time.
As for the Kobo Touch, I was really looking forward to it at Best Buy. But this is the only demo model they had:
The older Kobo WiFi! WTF! The Kobo Touch was here:
Not available for a fondle. It was the same way with the Kindle Touch. Best Buy had only the Kindle Basic out.
I’ll have to try the Kindle Touch again. And find a Kobo Touch.
Mike Cane’s xBlog 
Mike – please do a fondle report on this asap –
the Samsung store in the Shops at Columbus Circle in NYC has them on display for you to play with right now. You can’t buy one or anything, but your paws can feel the Ice Cream Sandwich chills.
http://www.droid-life.com/2011/12/03/want-to-get-your-hands-on-a-verizon-galaxy-nexus-early/
THANKS!
Sorry, but I have zero interest in any of the Nexus phones.
stop being selfish!
If the Samsung Store has the Galaxy Tab 7.7 in, I’d probably make a trip up there for that and then as a side-effect look at the Nexus. But I really have no big interest in phones and wouldn’t be able to judge how good or bad ICS is on a phone.
Mike, I just got a Samsung Galaxy S2 and I think you’d be pretty amazed by it. Any of the small text can be made larger and readable w/o finger-zooming (due to Android processes many don’t use). It is just amazingly fast and smooth and is a Wonder! I’ve spent almost 3 days with mine finding all kinds of things.
Saw a couple of videos of it performing same functions as the iPhone 4s and it was illuminating.
Galaxy S2? Is that a phone? I have no real interest in those right now, although the Galaxy Note impressed me in videos.