Some of your guys out there might have been able to snag one of Nook's Simple Touch devices the first time they went on sale here in the UK. Unfortunately, we had a small nightmare with our order: we'll save the story for another day, but suffice it to say that we won't be ordering anything direct from Nook again.
Thankfully though, we managed to get our hands on a couple of these budget eReaders, they turned up this morning and we've literally got them out of the box and we've stuck them on charge, so we're in a pretty good position to offer some first impressions.
As you can see in the image at the top of the page the Simple Touch comes in some nice, simple packaging. The section on the left of the image above is the sleeve which wraps around the section on the right which is home to the eReader itself.
Once you lift up the flap you're greeted by the Simple Touch itself, as you can see in the image to the right. The message which is on the screen is just a warning, in various languages, telling you to make sure that you charge the device's battery to full as soon as you get it. A key component of the charging procedure will be the cable which you use to do that and unfortunately Barnes and Noble have followed Amazon's lead and they've opted to just give you a usb cable to charge the device from your computer.That's exactly what we tried to do and well it simply didn't work. The device was stuck on a low battery eave plugged in for 15 minutes warning screen for about 2 hours before we got bored and plugged in our phone charger and surprise, surprise the eReader turned right on. Because of that we might recommend using your phone charger on the eReader if you have the same issue.
Other than charging everything was painless, you connect the device to your wifi much like you would any other tablet or phone and then you have to log into your Nook account to get everything up and running. We'll give you more of a run down in our full review in the coming weeks.
Something which struck us from the moment we took the device out of the box was how chunky this device is compared to a Kindle, when you take into account the price of this device though, it's a sacrifice which isn't too bad as you can see below. On the plus side though the plastic construction is nice and there's not really much chance of you accidentally dropping this device.
One thing which immediately stands out is that the screen is slightly recessed so we can see that getting dirty and dusty pretty quickly, but we'll let you know whether that happens in our full review! Check out the images down below to see how the device looks!
If you still haven't picked one up and you're quick you can still get them from Argos here for £29!
If you still haven't picked one up and you're quick you can still get them from Argos here for £29!
