Exactly 20 days ago, Amazon laid down the gauntlet by announcing its 7-inch Kindle Fire HD. Not to be outdone, Barnes & Noble announced today that it is releasing the latest devices in its tablet series: the Nook HD and HD+. The Nook HD and HD+ are available for pre-order right now and will be retail available by the end of October. B&N touts the tablets as having the best visual display in the game. Both the HD and HD+ feature 7-inch screens though the HD has a 1440 x 900 display and the HD+ a 1920 x 1280 display. Both screens were laminated directly to the glass to prevent those annoying air pockets from disrupting your viewing pleasure while highlighting large images with bright colors.
Technology review website The Verge reports that the HD may be more suitable for readers and the HD+ more suitable for sharing and home usage. Both gadgets, however, boast some impressive specs.
On top of its crystal-clear display, the HD will run on a dual-core OMAP4470 processor worth about 1.3GHz. It will feature 1GB of RAM and has the option for 8GB or 16GB of storage, depending on how much money you want to spend. The HD+ will run on the same processor, though it can squeeze out 1.5GHz of power. The display is a little bigger and a little clearer, and an features a HDMI outlet for television connectivity. Both tablets weigh approximately 11.1 ounces and run on Android’s 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS, though it’s customized to B&N specifications.
The power and speed of the latest Nook products allow for a lot of fun. For the family who shares a Nook, different user accounts can be set up and restrictions enacted to allow for safe reading and web surfing the way a family PC does. The carousel at the top of the screen is great for scrolling through recent apps, books, magazines, and videos as it doesn’t take up as much screen space as the Kindle while the bottom four mainstay icons allow for quick passage from your browser, to your apps, to your library, and to the Nook shop.
Magazine browsing goes hand-in-hand with shopping as users can tap on featured “hotspots” to immediately jump from browsing to buying. Just want to window shop? “Rip” the page out of the magazine and create your own scrapbook. Further, the Nook Video Store lets users buy, rent, and watch HD movies.
As I mentioned, the HD and HD+ are available now for pre-order and will hit the retail shelves by the end of October. The prices are better than Apple’s iPad; the HD runs for $199 with 8GB of storage and $229 for 16GB, and the HD+ goes for $269 for 16GB and $299 for 32GB.
