Thursday, March 22, 2012

Nook problems and solutions

A couple of weeks ago we flew to Florida. I took my Nook Touch and my Nook Color. Since I have a dual boot installed on the Color, it is my main tablet. It is great for web browsing, checking email, and Facebook but it is a little heavy for reading and the battery has to be recharged daily. I planned on using the Touch for my reading and I have a number of unread books on both devices.

I dutifully turned both devices off when asked to but the Touch would not come back on. It got as far as a screen saying "Read forever" and hung. Rebooting did not solve this. I even managed to return it to factory defaults but it still hung at the same place. Later I reset it two more times but it never made it past the ironically-named "Read Forever" screen. I suspect that the internal memory went bad.

Not a big deal since I had the Nook Color with me. Otherwise I would have been without my reading material. I also had a netbook, just in case, and I could have downloaded the books to it during a layover. The layover was in Baltimore which charges for WiFi and the netbook is not as good as a dedicated reader but I did have options.

That's the bad part. The good came when I contacted Barnes and Noble. All of the Nooks have a one year warranty. After explaining the problem to their technical support, they shipped me a new one with a mailing label to return the old one. Three days later I had a working Touch again.

So, one bad mark on build quality and one good mark on customer service.

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