Barnes & Noble Nook HD+ review

Any discussion of how the Nook HD+ looks and feels has to start with its bottom left corner. That's where the tablet's gray matte plastic gives way to a different color of gray matte plastic, with a silver circle cut out of the corner. I have no idea why this exists, or why it's existed on every Nook tablet since the original Nook Tablet. It looks like where you'd attach a carabiner to clip the Nook HD+ to your belt, but that seems like a bad thing to do with a 9-inch tablet. In truth, it's probably purely a design decision, intended to differentiate the Nook from other black and gray tablets (which is basically all of them). It certainly does set the Nook HD+ apart, but it's an odd way to do so — and I still can't help but want to do something with it.

It's sturdy and rigid, and feels like a device that costs more than $269. As you hold the HD+ vertically for reading or web browsing, there's a power button at the top of the right edge and two volume controls on top, next to the headphone jack. It's a slightly awkward layout — volume controls feel out of place on top, with no intuitive direction for increasing or decreasing sound — though it makes far more sense in landscape mode, holding the device sideways while you watch a movie.

Everything else is designed with portrait use in mind, though: the n-shaped home button and proprietary charging port are on the bottom if you hold the Nook HD+ in portrait, but awkwardly on the side in landscape, and the indented "n" logo on the back is vertical as well. I think it's probably just a bad place for volume controls, not a subtle nudge to use the Nook HD+ a particular way. Like the smaller Nook HD, the HD+ has no camera — that doesn't matter much to me, but make sure you don't need it before buying this device.

Otherwise, the HD+ is a pretty normal-looking tablet. I actually love its size: the 1.1-pound, 0.5-inch-thick body is light enough that you can hold it in one hand, and the rubbery material doesn't slip out of your hands — the device only comes in "Slate," a dark gray, and the material is the same everywhere but that one corner. The bezel around the screen is large enough for your thumbs to rest on, but because the screen is larger the edges don't feel as big as on the smaller Nook HD, where they dominate the design.

When I first met with Barnes & Noble to talk about the new Nooks, reps spent more time talking about the display than any other single feature or spec. I was encouraged by that, because a tablet's display is easily its most important feature. And upon closer inspection, the Nook HD+'s 9-inch, 1920 x 1280 panel is every bit as good as Barnes & Noble said it was.

The LCD is bright, crisp (256ppi is definitely Retina territory), and incredibly accurate. That last part is the most important, I think — from magazine images to movies to simple black text on white backgrounds, everything appears exactly as it should. The panel is also laminated to the glass, which makes it feel like you're actually tapping on a word or icon rather than the glass pane in front of it. That lamination also theoretically makes the Nook HD+ less prone to glare than some other tablets, but I didn't notice that as much — it's still pretty reflective.

I'm very confused by the speaker on the back of the Nook HD+. It clearly can be loud — I got a system update notification when I had the volume all the way up, and the "ding!" was so loud I jumped about nineteen feet in the air. Other system sounds are equally loud. But then I turned on Sherlock Holmes or Million Dollar Baby, or watched a video on YouTube, and I had to hold the speaker right to my ear in order to hear anything at all. When Barnes & Noble rolled out a software update to the Nook HD, it promised to fix these audio issues; the latest version hasn't done that, but there's clearly the hardware here to produce good sound. Or at least loud sound, anyway.

Nook OS, a custom version of Android 4.0 that looks and feels nothing like Google's version, powers both the Nook HD+ and the Nook HD. Barnes & Noble tried to take Android in a simpler direction, eschewing some of the customization options for a user interface that should be easier to use and understand. Calling it an Android tablet isn't even really fair — it's just a tablet that happens to be powered on a base level by Android. Read my Nook HD review for a full rundown of the software features, but the story here is a simple one: Barnes & Noble has a lot of good ideas, but hasn't polished the OS enough. Not by a long shot.

First, the good features. My Nook Today is a great way to find new things to read, and Barnes & Noble's recommendation engine is spot-on. The reading experience, as you'd expect from a bookseller, is excellent – there are plenty of ways to customize books to your liking, and text looks great on the sharp screen. It's easy to set up multiple user accounts, and to control what's accessible on each — the Nook HD+ is a good tablet for kids, though thanks to Amazon's new Kindle FreeTime Unlimited service there's probably more for your kid to do on the Kindle Fire HD. The Nook Video store adds a lot of good movies and TV — though it's neither as broad as Amazon's store nor as good a deal as the Prime offerings — and Barnes & Noble's bookstore is definitely as good as Amazon's. The Nook HD+'s web browser now has tabbed browsing, and though it's not particularly robust it's a decent app.

The gray UI itself is nice-looking, too, in a reserved and simple way. There are few crazy animations or flashy visuals; book, app, and movie icons appropriately dominate the interface whether you're on the home screen or in the store. While Amazon's tried to make its Kindle tablets about more than just reading, Barnes & Noble is sticking to its core — the Nook HD+ is a device for reading books and watching movies, and its interface reflects that.