It was announced yesterday on the official Barnes and Noble Nook blog that the biggest firmware update since the Nook was launched is coming next month.
The update version 1.5 is said to “dramatically increase” page-turn speed and include feature and performance enhancements most requested by Nook owners.
Other improvements mentioned include improved search functions, customized B&N library organization, the ability to sync last page read across all Nook apps, and password protection.
The update is expected to be available for manual download at the end of November on the Nook support page, or via WiFi to the Nook itself.
With B&N calling it the biggest firmware update since the Nook was launched, it makes you wonder what other feature enhancements they’ve added. With a statement like that it’s going to have a lot to live up to. Previous firmware updates have added a web browser, sudoku and chess, in-store reading, go-to-page function, improved WiFi, etc.
The firmware update certainly is going to make many Nook owners happy, but will it be enough to draw in new customers? Now that Amazon and Sony have both released updated versions of their ereaders with new hardware and upgraded features, B&N needs to do something big to increase sales over the upcoming holiday season, like introducing a Nook 2.
There does indeed need to be a lot more to that release in order to make it “our biggest update since we launched NOOK”. The 1.3 update was really big. The list they’ve provided this time is pretty limited.
There’s already a lot of grousing that the only organizational tools announced are for e-books bought from B&N. The ability to add a 16Gb micro-SD card is rather pointless when you can only use it for non-B&N content and there’s no organizational capability for non-B&N content. For most people, organization of non-B&N e-books is a big issue. Organization of music and audiobook files is currently non-existent; the NOOK puts them in some unfathomable sequence, mixing music and audiobook parts.
The announcement also doesn’t mention anything about improving what is maybe the industry’s worst PDF handling. Without zoom/pan, and without landscape viewing, reading PDFs on a NOOK is only done in desperation.
No mention was made of being able to read TXT or HTML files, even though the Web browser already provides the ability to render such files.
The announcement also didn’t mention any improvements in highlights, notes, and bookmarks. Those features currently are very basic (some might say ‘primitive’), and are pretty much not worth the bother.
B&N wouldn’t announce bug fixes, and we can only hope that the new release brings some blessed relief from the bugs. The bugs don’t affect many people, but the people who are affected are often seriously limited. If you buy a NOOK Wi-Fi and then find out that it’s incompatible with your particular model of Wi-Fi router, it’s hard to shrug that off. And it’s really bad business for the NOOK not to work for customers who have bought an unusually large number of B&N e-books. A lot of “freezing” complaints would be dispensed with if NOOK just put up a “Charge Me” screen when the battery runs low.
We’ll see what’s in the release in a month or so. I sure hope that it brings a lot of bug fixes and stability, along with more features than have been announced.
I would be pleased if they added some new font coding. I bought Nook when i was visiting US and I am from Czech Republic. As you may or may not know we have alot of different letters and sadly Nook can’t handle them. I am forced to convert my books to PDF and I don’t really wanna talk about PDFs + Nook.
And here i am thinking this would be logical because i think there are people in the USA reading foreign literature right?
Screw sudoku and chess i want something really useful for my Nook 🙂