This turned out to be a large overestimation of the NT's browser. It crashes without 2 or 3 pages into a comic and is extremely buggy during normal browsing. It runs Barnes & Noble apps just fine, but the selection of comics is limited to collected editions and even with that, is pretty sparse. I like that they have all volumes of Irredeemable and The Walking Dead, as well as various Marvel, Dark Horse, Archie and IDW trades, but their library seems to be very narrow among that. If you'd like to read any DC material, you are out of luck, since B&N had a falling out with DC and pulled all of their books. This prejudice expands into Dc's Vertigo imprint, too, which is unfortunate, because most of the trades I read are Vertigo.
There's also a few design issues with the unit itself that annoyed me. The expandable SDcard port is tucked behind and under the cute little embellishment on the bottom left corner of the device. You have to open the flap on the back and try to get the card in the space between the little corner bar and the side of the Nook. You have to be a fucking surgeon to succeed. I thought my feminine petite man-hands were just slightly too big, but my gnomish wife also had problems. Then the Nook didn't even register that it was in there. Also, I thought the face plate of my Nook was chipped, only to find out that the tiny ding on the top right of it was actually the microphone. Ugly design choice.
About the browser issues, I was vindicated upon reading message boards on B&N's own website, that many people seemed to be experiencing the same problems. The unfortunate side of this is that I did not see any customer support in the way of providing a fix for the problem, or even responding to these complaints.
I was left very frustrated and had a childish meltdown while trying to use my Nook. I feel horrible that my wife, who bought me a really nice present that I picked out, had to watch me cursing it. I know that apps can be sideloaded onto the device. I know that it can be rooted for total freedom to use third-party apps. I'm not very tech-savvy, so I don't want to deal with working around the devices software to use it the way it should work out of the box. Maybe that's expecting too much, but stay with me.
We then went across the street to Best Buy. I played with the demo Kindle Fire they had and was pleased to see that the Comix app provided a wonderful reading experience. The browser still crashes when trying to read the comics in the browser, but I have an app to download and read to my hearts content. The touch screen also seems much more intuitive and scrolling through the apps feels much more fluid than on the NT.
I explained to the gentleman at Best Buy that I liked the Fire, but didn't like that it was half the machine as the NT. Then he enlightened me to the news that the new KF had 1gb of memory, just like the NT. Sold. She bought the Fire, I took it home, and read some Batman. It looked great, and I actually found that I really enjoyed reading digital comics.
It's also very nice having access to a much larger marketplace than being restricted to the apps that B&N offers on their website.
In conclusion, I can say from experience with both devices, that for what I want out of an ereader/tablet the Fire is the winner by far. I don't read many books, so maybe the Nook would be better for someone who doesn't care about comics, but for me, the Nook fails pretty miserably.
I fully endorse the Fire if you are planning on using it to read comics. It's very nice.
And if anyone else tells me 'why don't you just buy an iPad?' someone is gonna get choked.
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