Barnes & Noble's Nook HD+ is an impressive $269 (16GB, direct) tablet. But a great 9-inch tablet experience is as much about content as it is about hardware, and that's where the Nook HD+ falls short. The Nook has definite advantages over the Kindle and other tablets, but they're better displayed in the $200 7-inch Nook HD, not in this larger, pricier tablet.
Physical Features
The Nook design just says "book" more than other tablets. It's smaller than competing large tablets, at 9.5 by 6.4 by .45 inches (HWD), and lighter at 1.16 pounds. The soft-touch back is easy to grip. In standard Nook fashion, the lower left hand corner is cropped, with a metal ring set into it. On the bottom panel, there's a MicroSD card slot and a charging port. This tablet is beautifully and sturdily built.
The Nook's 9-inch screen is even higher resolution than the $300 Kindle Fire HD 8.9's at 1,920-by-1,280 pixels, and colors seem better saturated, but they're definitely in the same class. The Kindle's screen is 254 pixels per inch, this one is 256ppi, and the $500 fourth-generation Apple iPad's screen is 263ppi; only the $400 Google Nexus 10's screen is noticeably tighter at an even 300 ppi.
Keep an eye on your Nook cable and AC adapter. Rather than the MicroUSB that almost every other Android tablet uses, the Nook HD+ comes with a proprietary 30-pin-to-USB cable and a special AC adapter. It'll charge from a computer, but it won't charge from other devices' adapters.
Unlike the Kindle Fire HD 8.9, but like the latest iPad, the Nook HD+'s design requests politely that you use it in portrait mode?that way, the embossed "n" Home button is facing up. But that puts the Volume buttons in an awkward position on the top, so "Volume Up" is on the right, rather the top. Turn the tablet into landscape mode and the buttons are in a more intuitive place, but then the home button looks wrong. The Kindle Fire goes whole-hog for landscape orientation and the iPad is all-in for portrait; I found the Nook's half-and-half approach a little disconcerting.
Wi-Fi, Apps, and Performance
The Nook HD+ runs a highly skinned version of Android 4.0. It's the same software as on the Nook HD, so you can read our Nook HD review for more details on things like the interface and document format support. The software gives the Nook a clean, highly simplified interface offering the ability to arrange your books, magazines, and newspapers onto virtual shelves. There's also less of a focus on constant content selling than the Kindle Fire. The HD+ supports multiple users with different content sets and profiles, just like the Nook HD.
The five main selections on the Nook's menu are Library, Apps, Web, Email, and Shop. The Nook uses a slightly modified version of the standard Android 4.0 browser, which is a good choice. It's responsive and displays pages well, as long as you're willing to do without Flash. And it scored better on the Browsermark benchmark than Amazon's Silk browser? 2,208 vs. 1,659, which would portend faster page loads if the Kindle Fire didn't have much faster Wi-Fi. An Article View button strips all of the ads off a page for a purer reading experience.
To connect to the Internet, the Nook HD+ uses 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, and its Wi-Fi reception is significantly weaker than the Kindle and iPad, both of which also support the 5GHz band. I had repeated problems getting the Nook HD+ to connect in a weak-signal area where the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 had no problem. Bringing the Nook closer to the Wi-Fi router solved the issue. As there are no speed test apps in the Nook store, I couldn't get a good measurement of Wi-Fi speeds, but 2.4GHz Wi-Fi is typically slower than 5GHz where both are available and running against a fast home or office connection.
You get the same 1.5GHz TI OMAP4470 processor as on the Kindle Fire HD 8.9, and while I couldn't run any system benchmarks, performance was fine, if not spectacular. The relatively slow Wi-Fi seemed to create most of the performance delays I saw when browsing the Nook Store for new content, for instance.
(Next page: Multimedia and Conclusions)
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