Barnes & Noble NOOK HD+ Review

Interface and Functionality:

Well now, the NOOK HD+ is sporting the same heavily customized Android experience that’s seen on the 7-inch NOOK HD, which is based off Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. We won’t get into the specifics, since we covered it in our review of the NOOK HD, but as a whole, it feels more faithful to Android than what Amazon does with its Kindle Fire HD tablets. Although there’s a healthy selection of content for books, magazines, and newspapers with the NOOK ecosystem, its multimedia content offering and apps selection pale in comparison to what’s available with Amazon’s ecosystem – or for the matter, the usual Android experience.


Even with the added real estate, there’s no tweaking done with any of the core organizer apps – so they maintain their presentations from what we’ve seen on the NOOK HD already. Still, it’s not too bad considering that the email app utilizes that typical two-panel layout that’s become synonymous with tablets.
If there was something we were hoping to see desperately changed with this full-sized tablet, it has to be the landscape keyboard layout. Alas, nothing has been done to change its stretched out smartphone-like layout in landscape. Nonetheless, the portrait option seems a bit easier to handle – albeit, there’s still some stretching required by our digits to reach certain buttons.


Processor and Memory:

Despite being outfitted with a slightly higher clocked processor, it does nothing to improve the tablet’s performance. In fact, its dual-core 1.5GHz ARM-based TI OMAP 4470 processor with 1GB of RAM exhibits a lot of sluggishness with various operations. Specifically, it’s most evident as we switch to using a live wallpaper, as it exhibits extremely choppy movements that prove to be distracting. Who knows what the culprit is, whether it’s software related or simply the high resolution display, but it’s definitely flawed in this category. Other times, though, it seems to exude a responsive performance – so when it’s running fine, it’s not that bad.

With storage capacity, Barnes & Noble decided to increase the total with the NOOK HD+. Essentially, you can pick between a 16GB or 32GB model – with both having expandability thanks to their built-in microSD card slot.


Internet and Connectivity:

Unfortunately, the sluggish performance of the NOOK HD+ extends into the web browsing experience. Sure, it’s able to load up pages very quickly and render them properly, but it’s marred by some serious erratic movements with navigational controls. Ultimately, it’s a downer considering the high-resolution display is a nice touch for the experience.


Like its pint sized sibling, the NOOK HD+ is only available in Wi-Fi form at the moment – with no indication if we’ll see cellular connected variants at some point. Additionally, it features Bluetooth, but lacks other luxuries such as aGPS and NFC.