[Nook Color General] mr72:
My own NC has a crack in the bezel at the microUSB port, has since it was a month old. All engineers of electronic equipment understand this serious drawback and endeavor to design devices, especially handheld devices, that do not have to endure leverage and torque of a connector while in use if it is not absolutely necessary.

Yeah rather than forcing you to stay in the garden they are just making it terribly inconvenient to leave. At least Apple will sell you a tablet with 64GB of memory. Gimme a N7 with 64GB of onboard flash for $300 and we'll all be happy. But this is the iTunes model, which is nearly identical to the Amazon and B&N model: we give you a device for cheap and then make a fortune selling you content. The difference is that Apple also makes a fortune on the device when they sell it to you. And the other difference is at least Apple doesn't make it virtually impossible to store a meaningful quantity of content on the device. I think this is the iTunes model on steroids.

It's not about stable & cheap data connection. I have to travel overseas at least 3-4 times per year. Netflix, for example, do not even OFFER their service in Europe. I could have a free wifi hotspot follow me around in a truck and it wouldn't matter. They don't offer it because the "copyright holders" have negotiated this limitation into the service. I have not tried it, but I presume the same limitation applies to Amazon and Google Play. So when I am stuck in Berlin for two weeks, you know it doesn't take me long to play the max of 1-2 movies I can store in the 8GB of a N7, but I can and do take a a handful of 8GB SD cars with me with 2 movies each and 10 of them on my internal 32GB that will give me plenty to keep me busy. Further, in China, ALL streaming/cloud is blocked in the entire country, and even Google search results are heavily filtered. The internet is not what we think it is when you are in China. This is not a problem of technology, it's a problem of politics, government, and unreasonable copyright law.

And wifi on planes, are you kidding? You pay for half hour at a time. It is not cheap. And there is no charging outlet. You will not make it from Newark to Paris on an airplane on one charge on your NC if you have to turn on wifi. No way. Better bring some actual paper books. Oh and good luck buying books written in English to read coming home from France. Been there, done that.

I am sure Google will have a huge success with this tablet even with this obvious limitation for the majority of potential users. And for some of us, like me, it will be a frustrating waste of a good tablet, so we'll buy something else that does not have this limitation. It is frustrating, but it's reality. Really the N7 is not there to compete with Nook Color or iPad. It is there to blow away the Kindle Fire, nothing more. Google wants ALL of the online media store and cloud storage business, and Amazon is a formidable competitor. B&N is a fringe candidate in this game. But those guys are really not trying to make general-use tablets. They are making media consumption devices plain and simple. I agree the Google model is far more customer friendly than Amazon, B&N, or especially Apple. But not including an SD slot is still a slap in the face to real Android tablet users.