Just got back from my local B&N with a demo nook. Being a technical person, I have dealt with slow, buggy, alpha and beta soft/hardware, and the nook software probably needed a few more builds before it was released to the public. Although I didn't experience any crashes or Android force closes, I did find myself clicking extra a few times because the lag made it feel like my original commands had not registered.
The hardware itself was solid feeling, even a bit heavy for its size. I would have prefered the bezel be pure white instead of the current light gray, which looked a little "dirty" to me. The actual E-ink screen seemed to have a very slight yellow/parchment cast to it compared to other displays I've seen. The much talked about "reformatting" screen when loading a book was not too bad, but all the demo files on the nook were small.
My biggest gripe at this point is that side-loaded content shows up in a separate section from your B&N downloads under "my library". This means that there is no cover flow search, or sort for non-B&N content. This is a major issue for me. I have a huge collection of ebooks that I have collected and will be stuck navigating through them using a flat list, unable to apply any sort to them (such as author, title, etc).
Really I don't anticipate buying many books from the B&N online bookstore, at least until I read through the hundreds of epub and PDF files I already have. The fact this non-B&N content is tossed off to the side is fairly off-putting, and is making me look a little harder at the Sony PRS-300 or 505.
I will hang on to my pre-order for now, with much hope that B&N will be active in providing software updates that address customer concerns or that the Android dev community will adopt the nook as their next hacking project. The possibilities for this device are tremendous and B&N could have a Kindle-killer on their hands if they are active with updates, or provide an SDK (or have left it open enough for devs).
