[Q] New nookColor. Bad luck?

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So, I bought my wife a nook Color. She's an English teacher and she's embraced technology as a teaching aid, so I figured it would be perfect.

I did not modify the nook AT ALL. All I did was put some ebooks on it from around the web, loaded onto an SD card. Nothing unusual beyond it being a few THOUSAND files in .epub and .pdf format.

ANYHOW, she's seen issues.

First, she saw issues where the nook thought she was tapping constantly in the exact same spot. To be exact, the spot where the 'b' is. If we hit the nook home button, it kept clicking the book that was in the exact same spot as the 'b' button was. Shutting the nook off entirely fixed it.

Second, frequent lockups during normal use. Sometimes in the browser. Other times flipping through PDFs. Android itself usually wasn't locked up since we could hold the power button and get the dialog asking us if we REALLY wanted to shut it down, but the nook overlay GUI was certainly dead to us. Again, a hard reset (power button until it shut down) and power up fixed this without a problem.

At this point, we thought it would be a good idea to swap this out as a potential hardware issue. We bought it from Best Buy, so back to BB we went and swapped it out for another nookColor.

Now, we're seeing more issues, but different ones.

Third, the power cable doesn't seem to want to fit properly into the USB port like the last one did. A little play and it slides in ok, so no big deal.

Fourth, buttons are sensitive to where it thinks we tapped twice. I don't think this is a real issue since it's a matter of learning the device I think.

Fifth, and fairly important... this only happened once. It lost all sound. We have a child who's just over 1 year old, so the B&N's stance to try to set a high focus on that aspect was awesome, especially the childrens' books with the professional voice actors.

Now, it's my opinion that it's just an OS that was released prematurely. I think many of these issues will be fixed with the first update. Am I alone in these issues? Has anybody else seen anything similar?

For the record, I've taken a very hands-off experience with this since I'm extremely technologically savvy, and I wanted my wife to be able to run it without needing me there. None of these issues have persisted throughout a shutdown-reboot except for the sound issue. It required an 'erase and unregister' through the device info in settings.

I bought a NC for myself and a day later my wife bought one at the same B&N. The one she bought had terrible screen flicker so we exchanged it for another. The second NC would FC on her ebooks, drop wifi, and would make a cheap plastic creak when pressed to tight on the left side. Thinking the bad batch idea we exchanged the NC at a different B&N and the third one had the same screen flicker the first one had so we turned around and went back and exchanged it for a fourth one. Finally. The fourth one worked fine and does not creak at all.

I wouldn't necessarily say your problems are OS related. Android has been running on a lot of portable devices for quite some time now. I think it can be considered a mature OS. The ebooks we have that caused the second NC to FC work flawlessly on my NC and the new fourth one. Rebooting the second NC didn't help with the FC'ing and wifi dropping. So we felt the problem was hardware related like the screen flickering. Our feeling was we didn't want to mess around, it's $250, we were determined to keep exchanging until we found one that worked.

You might want to think about exchanging it for another. Who knows how many will remain to be in stock as the date gets closer to Christmas. I wouldn't recommend trying to exchange it after Christmas, you may end up getting a re-shrink wrapped one that was returned for some unknown reason.

android is becoming mature but the nook is oem'dto death. This os is crap by all accounts! Once something better is available we will see improvements

The screen thing is turning out to be kinda common.
Good news is.... its being blamed on an oversensitive screen, dirt and or moisture. Any tiny bit of the latter two. Usually fixes itself right up with a wiping or a screen protector and a lock/unlock of the device.

I have experienced and read about the charger cord too.....have yet to see any problems because of it but do worry about having to re-solder something sooner or later.

I have to wonder about the usefulness of a Nook Color as "a teaching tool" right outta the box though?? Besides making your wife a walking reference that is.

was it plugged in? There are issues when plugged in and tapping.

I also had to "wiggle" the USB cord to get it to fit into my Nook as well.

I had the creak on the left side as well. Haven't had a chance to exchange it yet, but it's on the radar.

I don't mean a tool to use with the students, I figured it may make things easier on her if she's got ALL of the books she uses with her students on a single table that she can carry around the classroom referencing instead of needing 30 different books. I don't know if it was a fool's idea yet or not! It's the thought that counts.

Defiantly save on the back!!
Nice one, guess I just want mine to do everything

Galaxy Tabs.....Worth every penny!!

My first nook had the sound problem, except it would happen every 15 minutes and only hard reboot would fix it.

I replaced it and the second works flawlessly (as far as I can tell).