NOOK Tablet Review

By Richard Corzo

I'd been thinking about a device I could use in my living room to look up things on the Internet. My iPhone of course has a browser, but I was thinking something with a bigger screen would be nice. An iPad would work, but I figured I would wait for the iPad 3 whenever that comes out. But then I started wondering if I needed that much tablet.

I read about the Amazon Kindle Fire and the NOOK Tablet and had decided that the NOOK had the benefit of Barnes & Noble's previous experience with the NOOK Color (the predecessor to this year's NOOK Tablet). A coworker mentioned that his parents had gotten a Kindle Fire for Christmas while his fiancée had gotten a NOOK Tablet, so he had some brief hands-on experience with both. He  thought the NOOK was a more mature product, which confirmed my suspicions. So Friday before New Year’s I picked up a NOOK Tablet.

It was easy enough to get started. You connect to a Wi-Fi network and then set up a Barnes & Noble account if you don’t already have one.  Like the Kindle Fire, the NOOK Tablet is a 7” tablet with a 16 by 9 aspect ratio. To start, you’ll find a Quick Guide and User Guide sitting on the desktop. There is also a shelf at the bottom of the screen with your more recent items sitting on it, whether that be books or magazines you’ve been reading or apps you’ve acquired. You can move items from the shelf to the desktop.

There is a NOOK button (letter n) at the bottom of the screen which brings up the Quick Nav bar  From there you can choose Home (the desktop), Library, Shop, Search, Apps, Web, or Settings. The Library has a few free books to start with and any e-books or digital magazines that you purchase from Barnes & Noble.

Of course B&N wants to sell e-books, so the e-reader app works well and now I can read my Steve Jobs e-book while sitting on my couch. As is typical for an e-reader, the amount of text on the page depends on the screen size and the text size that you choose. In addition to NOOK e-books, NOOKs support the ePub format. I also tried subscribing to a magazine and it looks good on the screen, although I imagine it would look even better on the larger iPad screen. It turns out the PDF reader is also excellent. You can double-tap to enlarge a section of the PDF page.

Shop, in the Quick Nav Bar, lets you shop for NOOK books, magazines, newspapers, or apps. While you’re in the NOOK Store, if you are specifically looking for apps, just add the word “app” to whatever you’re searching for. Otherwise you’ll get book results mixed in. Back on the Quick Nav bar, Search option will search for things on your NOOK, and Apps shows the apps in your library.

Web will start the web browser. It works well and even supports Flash, but I can see why Steve Jobs wanted to avoid it on his mobile devices. I watched a YouTube video and the audio was out of sync with the video. The controls, which were designed to be operated with the precision of a mouse cursor, were hard to operate with a finger. For syncing bookmarks I found the Xmarks app, but it requires a Premium subscription at $12 a year to continue syncing beyond the 14-day trial period.

The e-mail app works well, even being able to open Microsoft Office document attachments with an included Quickoffice app. The onscreen keyboard seems just about right with the NOOK in portrait orientation.

Other included apps are Netflix and Crosswords. I bought a handful of apps from the NOOK app store, including Scrabble and Audubon Wildflowers. The selection of apps is where the NOOK comes up a little short. The NOOK is a customized Android device, but you can’t get apps from the Android Marketplace, only from the NOOK app store. There was a loophole that allowed you to install the Amazon Appstore for Android and get apps from there, but that loophole was closed in the last firmware update.

There is no included calendar app, and the one in the app store is very basic. There’s a corresponding $40 desktop application that’s supposed to sync the calendar on the NOOK with one on your Mac or PC. That’s not worth it to me as I have my calendar handy on my iPhone.

I also have no use for a front or rear-facing camera, which you won’t find on the NOOK Tablet or Kindle Fire.

The user interface is not 100% consistent, perhaps showing the tablet’s Android underpinnings. There is a thin status bar at the bottom of the screen just above the NOOK button. Sometimes there is a left curving arrow there that will take you back to the previous screen. Even if you don’t see the arrow you can usually swipe left in the status bar area to go back. But occasionally you have to use the NOOK button to exit an app.

Overall I am happy with my NOOK Tablet. It’s got a good quality screen, has a responsive touch screen, runs several days on a charge, and does what I need it to do. So depending on your needs you may also find that you can live with less tablet than an iPad.

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