A shootout between the Kindle 3G and its competitors in the market is inevitable, as consumers would want to get the real score by spending their hard-earned money, especially in this time of economic uncertainties. There are only a few brands with any share of the eBook reading market. You’ve got Amazon competitor Barnes and Noble’s Nook, the Sony Reader, and Apple’s iPad.

Let’s start with the iPad to say that it really is head and shoulders above the market for mere eBook reading as it has richer features to make it a multimedia device other than a laptop. It’s a bona fide tablet computing device that does more than limit itself to the more focused functional practicality of the Kindle. People who would buy an iPad 3G wouldn’t buy it for its e-book reading functionality, which is just another subset of its multimedia prowess.

No, people will buy it more for its ability to watch movies, view pictures, and browse the Internet. While the Kindle3 now had 3G and WiFi models in the same way as the iPad, the latter does a nicer job of navigating the full colors of whatever site you’re visiting, along with reading PDFs of full-color pages that you will not get on the Amazon e-reader. If you enjoy reading novels outright, Apple’s eBook Reader is overkill. In addition to being more expensive, it’s also heavy on the wrist to hold when reading and doesn’t really lend itself well to reading in direct sunlight. For pure reading fun, the Kindle3G is the best and most practical option.

So what’s left in the shootout that’s really on the same keel is the Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. Let’s see the latter. Released nearly two years later and positioned as a direct rival to Amazon’s bestseller, the Android-based Nook3G sports the same 6-inch e-paper display with a 3.5-inch color LCD touchscreen below for navigation and it offers features that the second generation Kindle did not have. It didn’t have 3G and WiFi connectivity in 2009. The current Kindle-3G is obviously a direct response to the growing popularity of the Nook with these wireless connectivity features.

Just don’t expect it to have text-to-speech capability and turn pages that fast. But at a lower price of $149 and over 2 million books in the B&N online store, it’s second to none. The new Color Nook with 7-inch full-color multi-touch screen released in October has a larger internal storage of 8GB and supports a 32GB microSD slot. (But this is now a full tablet computer that’s more positioned against the iPad than the Kindles.)

The Sony Reader comes in various models with the Sony Reader Touch Edition PRS600/650 being a direct rival with the same 6-inch e-paper display. With a highly reflective touch screen and no wireless data connectivity options, it’s no surprise that it doesn’t sell as well as the others and suffers on a feature-by-feature basis. You can forget about this one for now and save your money for the Nook or Kindle 3.