Gadgetory

well this is David with the verge and this is the Barnes & Noble nuke HD plus it's the larger of the two new tablets from the company along with the new nuke HD it's a 9 inch tablet which makes it a little big for reading which obviously Barnes and Noble is trying to promote but it's actually pretty easy to hold and use it only weighs slightly over a pound and you can actually hold it in one hand though it's still a little awkward trying to get your thumbs all over the screen it's a little more normal-looking than the smaller Nook HD which stands out has a gray matte rubbery texture all over its body but it does have one unique feature it's the cut out circle on the bottom left corner which is for something it's probably just a design decision so you can tell this tablet apart from others but I kind of found myself wondering what all I could do with it that weird cutout will definitely be the first thing you notice but the second one is gonna be the 9 inch nineteen twenty by twelve eighty display it's a really good screen it has really great color reproduction and great viewing angles having a screen this sharp is really important on a device that's designed for reading text on the Nook HD plus is crisp and clean no matter how small it is and it really does help the reading experience actually the reading experience in general is really solid on this device it's smooth and responsive there are a bunch of ways to customize fonts colors and line Heights and Barnes & Noble has a huge library of books and periodicals available unfortunately that's about the only good experience on the note HD plus it's actually really frustrating there are so many good ideas and cool features but they're just not well done I love the idea of nook today which shows you the weather and it recommends new things to read and actually offer some really good stuff Barnes Noble has a great recommendations engine I also like the magazine reader and even the catalogue reader which are high-res and beautiful and let you rip out and save pages into a digital scrapbook it's really cool the UI is even nice the Nook HD Plus is based on Android 4.0 but it's been totally redesigned and it really looks nothing like you'd expect from Android it's simple and mostly good looking other than the crazy drop shadows on some icons but everything is just slow and laggy and kind of clunky there's a cool multiple accounts feature that lets you share your tablet with other people but it takes a really long time to switch between accounts like a really long time and it actually shows the original account before switching away from it that's pretty rough when you're trying to keep things separate launching apps takes a while and even dragging down the notification or Settings window which seems like a pretty basic thing is really laggy there's a cool favorites menu which is always accessible in the bottom right corner except that it takes three seconds to open every time and just becomes really frustrating to use there's a 1.5 gigahertz TI processor inside the nuke HD Plus which is plenty powerful and it plays even really intensive games just fine after kind of an interminable loading process games all work pretty well but it seems like Barnes & Noble didn't really do anything to fine tune its own software even watching movies which look great on the high-res screen and can actually be played up to 1080p are hurt a bit by the weak single speaker on the back though you can at least fix that with a pair of headphones the neck HD plus starts at $269 for 16 gigs of internal storage though you can get 32 gigs for $299 and you absolutely showed $30 for more storage is an easy deal but unless you want the absolute cheapest tablet you can find you probably shouldn't buy this one at least not yet most of the new HD pluses problems can probably be fixed by software updates and Barnes & Noble does seem to be committed to fixing them but for right now it's just too buggy to be fun to use the Nexus 10 and the Kindle Fire HD both have great screens comparable prices and they offer much much better performance and that's not to mention Apple's iPad or especially the iPad Mini which isn't much more expensive than the nokey HD plus and it offers much better performance plus a much larger app ecosystem than you get from Barnes & Noble's extra curated set of Android apps this is a great reading tablet and it's fine for things like Netflix and Hulu but if you want to do more and you should with a tablet there are much better options out there