Gadgetory

hey guys it's David with the verbs checking out two new tablets and Barnes & Noble it's the nook HD and the Nook HD+ they're two totally new tablets unlike anything Barnes enola side before and they're making a big deal out of the technology inside both and the new interface and there's some new stuff in the shop and they're pretty great tablets what we've seen so far the first thing you'll notice when you turn the new nubs on is that there are a bunch of different user profiles you can boot into barns and we'll talked a lot about how families tend to share tablets and so you can actually set up completely separate user accounts there's one that kind of manages everything but you can set up one for your kid or your spouse or whoever and manage what apps are books or websites they're allowed to visit it's a pretty cool feature we've seen something like it on other tablets but this is a very kind of complete core feature in the android operating system here they've also redesign the interface a lot on these new tablets it's based on Android 4.3 alee nothing like a lot of the Android tablets we've seen it has a carousel at the top kind of like what Amazon did with all your most recent stuff but it doesn't take up the whole page and you still get icons for apps or bookmarks or what have you and it's a pretty nice compromise I think between all of that stuff because this Ice Cream Sandwich there's also a bunch of different home screens so you can customize it to your heart's content there's four icons down at the bottom which launched you into your browser or your apps or your library which has all your magazines and books and whatnot in it but really the biggest changes here brought on by the displays the nook HD has a 7-inch 1440 x 900 display which horizontals making a big deal out of it being better than the kindle fire or the Nexus 7 or any of the other tablets out there at the same size and it really does look good blacks or really black and whites are really white it's great for reading everything's really crisp and we got to watch movies on it too and with the wide display it looks really nice and on the HD Plus you get on full 1920 x 1080 display and it'll actually output 1080p content onto your TV via hdmi if you want it but even on the device itself the screen looks really really good Barnes & Nobles talked a lot about the technology behind the display how they have laminated the display to the glass and how there's no air gap so it should be less reflective and the resolutions a big deal and all these things are really important on a reading tablet and from what we've seen so far it's pretty successful the screen is definitely one of the best we've seen on a tablet and having such a great display makes things like magazines and catalogs would look really good and there are a bunch of nifty features they've implemented especially for the bigger screen that works pretty well you can swipe down with two fingers on any given page and clip a page to basically a scrapbook like magazine clippings and you can also tap on a hotspot they're calling it for products that will jump you straight to a website where you can buy the product from Pottery Barn or whatever catalog you're reading it's a pretty clever feature and it's a whole new section of the barnes & noble store they've also beefed up the magazines and there are more apps and books and again all these things are designed to be used on the bigger screen and the higher res screen and especially magazines like National Geographic look really great with big images and great colors the other thing Barnes & Noble talked a lot about was just the overall performance of devices there are brand new TI OMAP processors built into both devices and we were using pre production software so there were some lags and some crashes and some issues but Barnes & Noble promises that'll all be worked out by the time these products are ready and everything else that we saw when it worked it worked really well really smoothly even with big images and magazines things seem to work really fluid both new nook tablets are going to be available at the end of October but they are available for pre-order now the 7-inch device is going to be a hundred ninety nine dollars for eight days of storage or four thirty dollars more you can get 16 gigs of storage and with such a small gap expect a lot of people to get more storage the HD plus the 9 inch model is going to be available also at the end of October for 269 dollars for 16 gigs of storage we can get 30 24 again only thirty dollars more it's a small gap and people should just get more storage they look really great especially with the kindle fire out it's going to be a really interesting holiday season and there's certainly a lot of good tablet