One of the new features in Google Android 2.2 Froyo is the ability to store applications on an SD card, freeing up space on your phone’s main memory. Developers need to enable this feature in their apps, so not every app available can be stored on an SD card, but I’ve already freed up plenty of storage space on my Nexus One by moving a handful of apps to my 8GB microSD card.
So I was pretty excited to learn that Barnes & Noble had released a new version of the Nook eBook reader for Android. When I first checked out the Nook app a few weeks ago, I was pretty impressed with its features, but underwhelmed by the fact that it took up more than 17MB of storage space — making it by far the largest app on my phone. I quickly uninstalled it.
Today I tried downloading the latest version of the Nook app and then I moved it to my SD card. You can see the results above. It still takes up more storage space than any other app on my device — and that’s main storage. When I uninstalled the Nook app, my phone storage available space jumped from about 28MB to 40MB.
In other words, moving an app to your SD card doesn’t actually move all of the files to your SD card. Some files will be left behind, and in the case of the Nook app, they still take up an awful lot of space. If you have a phone with a huge amount of internal storage space, or if you only plan to install a few apps, this might not be a problem. But with the Amazon Kindle app using less than 4MB and the Borders app taking up less than 1MB, it seems strange that Barnes & Noble’s eBook reader takes up so much space.
On the other hand, the latest version for the Kindel app also adds a few other features such a new search function in the library, four new themes, and new screen settings. You can also copy unencrypted ePUB files from a computer to your device and open them in the Nook app.
Nook for Android is available as a free download from the Android Market.
via Gizmodo