Fly away, Firefly....comparison between Nook Simple Touch and Onyx Firefly

As much as I love some things about the Boox Onyx Firefly, its failures may cause me to sell it.

Yes it is so great for organizing documents in folders and subfolders! Yes it has 4gb memory and SD card slot! Yes it has a light! Yes it has page turn buttons and a back button! Those are all GREAT things.

The Nook Simple Touch matches most of those things, only 2gb memory but SD card makes that ok. No light. Everything else, yes.

But...the light on the Firefly makes the text look washed out. (Not to mention it can be seen from the space station).

The Firefly processor is slow, in my unofficial comparison, much slower than the Nook ST. Try opening a book on both and it becomes very clear.

I have tested several books on each device...the same books...each of which had been opened previously, so no start up caching was necessary. The Nook takes 1 second to go to the last page. The Firefly takes 7-10 seconds to go to the last page. Maybe that doesn't sound like a lot, but it is.

The Firefly is much heavier than the Nook.

But the biggest drawback of all, and the deal breaker, is the text display. The Firefly has 3 applications to display text.

1. PDF reader, which can display epub fine, but which will not use side loaded fonts. Deal breaker.
2. FB Reader, which will not display any italics. Deal breaker
3. Cool Reader, which will display italics on some documents correctly, but completely ignore them on others. That is not the deal breaker.  But the fact that it deletes ALL spaces between paragraphs, including page breaks between chapters, is a huge deal breaker. Instead of my nicely formatted epub documents, it displays one long continuous unbroken field of text. Big time deal breaker. Even though I can use my font, it is just not comfortable or enjoyable to read like that.

The Nook, I did have to root and add Mantano to get my own font. Now that I have done that, the display is excellent. All my formatting is retained, the italics are correct, the font is sharp, dark, and I can use my preferred font, altogether making it overall much nicer to read on than the Firefly.

So despite the light, and the larger memory, the Nook ST wins the contest. The Firefly is going to have to fly away. I just can't read on it like that.

The good thing is, I just got a good deal on a Nook Glowlight. So when that gets here, I will compare it with my others.

UPDATE 8-31

Yes I sold the Firefly. It did not meet my needs. Still waiting on the Nook Glow, the site I am getting from is a slow shipper. I do plan to put Nook Manager on it as soon as I get it, and Mantano + my favorite font. Unless I hate the light, then I will resell it. But any light is better than no light. So I will probably like it and sell the unlighted Nook.