I played with a Nook Color and with an iPad 2 at Best Buy last weekend. The Nook felt like it was worth approximately half an iPad, which is about how it's priced.
Granted, that's a great niche to be in. My reservations: it had a weak speaker, it felt a bit bendy, and it didn't seem to rotate the screen too often when I switched from horizontal to vertical orientation. I don't think its software was designed to rotate as often as iOS does. I can definitely see having one of these around the house to hack on but it's got flaws.
"My reservations: it had a weak speaker, it felt a bit bendy, and it didn't seem to rotate the screen too often when I switched from horizontal to vertical orientation."
The speaker is positioned in the rear and it pushes sound away. I'm sure they did that for aesthetic (decluttered front bezel) and functional (no worrying about getting schmutz in the speaker grill) reasons. But, yeah, that causes distant, disembodied sound.
I find my Nook Color solidly built for the price. The nice glass screen (I use an anti-glare screen protector to use it outside) is super-responsive almost to a fault. The plastic bezel is solid and finished well and doesn't seem to flex or pop when I hold it. The back plastic has a really grippy rubber coating that makes it nice to hold in one hand, as well. I think if they were to iterate, they should do away with the front plastic bezel and rock a total glass front, but I give it nice marks. I'd certainly consider paying up to 100 more for it and not be dissatisfied.
About rotation, I think it's Apple's use of transitional animation that makes it feel like it's more responsive and, thus, more "accustomed" to it. The NC has the same accelerometer chip as the Xoom, so I think if you perceive any lag, it could be in the redrawing of the screen.
That said, if you'd ever buy one, forgo all the installed software, root the device, and put a version of Cyanogenmod 7 (2.3 Gingerbread) on it. I use phiredrop 6. Stable as a table, full Android Market (and Amazon, btw), and youtube in fullscreen and flash in the browser.
Weird, I have had the opposite experience re: touch screen responsiveness. Difficulty turning pages, multiple "clicks" to get a button to work, etc.
Being the owner of both an iPad and a rooted Nook Color, there's a pretty large quality gap between the two. That's not to say the NC is terrible -- the NC is actually a serious value buy -- but it's a testament to the competitive advantage that Apple has over everyone else in the tablet market.
If you look closely, apple resizes the view instantly to the horizontal dimensions and then gives a rotation animation, so they can instantly rotate if they wanted to.
That's basically my take on it - I bought it to play around with (and, of all things, run the Kindle app) and it's good for that and not really a ton more.
The speaker's very weak, but mine doesn't feel bendy at all. It's very solid, considering the price.
I don't know how iOS handles it, but Android treats rotation... oddly. If you haven't specifically handled it, it basically kills your activity, loads the new rotated layout (which can be radically different from the other orientation's view), and then reloads your activity. Any initialization, etc, happens again (which is why, sometimes in some apps, you rotate and form fields are cleared).
You can cache data and make rotates pretty seamless, but it still seems like a decent amount of overhead that wouldn't necessarily be there.
What I saw was even worse... Nook just doesn't even try to rotate most of the time.
In iOS the default seems to be that any and every app will rotate in a meaningful way when I turn the device. Not so in my 5 minute demo of the Nook. It's not that it can't smoothly rotate the screen when it wants to, it's that it doesn't attempt to rotate the screen to match my position as often as iOS apps do.
>it doesn't attempt to rotate the screen to match my position as often as iOS apps do
It was your particular phrasing of this issue that made me think that this may be a feature of the Nook, and not a bug.
My biggest complaint about any iOS device used to be that when I was reading in bed, sometimes I would lie on my side, causing the screen to rotate when I didn't really want it to. Obviously, the screen-orientation lock functionality was a godsend for fixing this issue for me.
It occurs to me that maybe, since the "primary" function of the Nook is reading, that it doesn't attempt screen rotation unless it really thinks that was your intent.
