The e-book wars have come to Android. After slugging it out with Amazon’s Kindle app on the Apple App Store, Barnes & Noble have now come out with a Nook app for the Android Market, where Android had already unleashed a Kindle app not too long ago. The app gives users access to more than a million titles and runs on all Android devices that are running version 1.6 or higher of the OS.
We downloaded the app and took it for a spin on our Motorola Milestone and well, truth be told, we are not too impressed. A major part of our displeasure stems from the fact that the app is not just a 5 MB plus download, but that it hogs an incredible 17 MB on your device. Now, space is a rather precious commodity on Android devices, so having one app occupy so much space is a bit of a luxury, even though the app itself is free. So the very fact that we had to un-install half a dozen apps to get the nagging “short of memory” message off the notification bar did not get the app off to a flying start. The fact that Kindle takes up just 3.55 MB in comparison makes the Nook app seem, well, more obese than heavyweight.
But if you do have space to spare, the Nook app delivers a lot. You can purchase books, get free sample chapters, read it across a variety of devices, and best of all, you can even lend certain e-books by letting your friends access them for 14 days. Top that off with a decent book reading experience (we rather like the page turning animations) and prices that are very very competitive and in many cases, better than what we have seen on the Kindle, and you can say that this app has lots of offer. All we ask of it is to shed those megabytes, or give us a free update to FroYo with the option to save apps to memory card.
Petatrends 
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