Yeah, I know. The Nook line is a bunch of “me too” products and hopeless also rans. Still, I think it’s good for someone to give Amazon some competition from the other end of the market.
The 7-inch Nook HD is aimed primarily at readers, while the HD+ is a 9-inch device intended more for shared, home use. In both cases, reps were full of superlatives for the devices, and evidence to back them up. When they bragged about the Nook HD being the “lightest 7-inch tablet on the market,” reps produced a Nexus 7 and a Kindle Fire HD for comparison. (At 11.1 ounces, it’s very light.)
Comparisons to Google and Amazon’s devices abounded — the Nook HD’s 1440 x 900 display is higher-resolution than either, and Barnes & Noble claims the display is better laminated to the glass as well. The HD+ bumps the resolution up to 1920 x 1080 1280 on its 9-inch screen — reps brought an iPad along for comparison — and also looks fantastic.
You say that, but Amazon is hopelessly US-centric. The Nook has substantial market penetration in the UK, for instance.
(And in eReader terms, Amazon has lost the French-speaking market in both Canada and France to Kobo…)
Gotta admit that if it proved even moderately hackable, this would entice me more than the Kindle. Perhaps entirely due to the fact that they allow for slightly more reasonable cost increases for extra interal storage ($30 for an upgrade compared to $50 at Amazon or $100 at Apple).
Keep in mind that you can add your own memory card to the Nooks to increase the storage.
Previous Nooks have been easily hacked. I’m not sure if B&N will tighten things up now with the addition of their own video content service, but hacking the Nook Color was as easy as putting the image on a microSD unit and plugging it in.
If those are hacked, the $269 one is a phenomenal deal. I mean, that’s basically the same hardware as the $299 KFHD8.9, right? Which was itself a screaming deal, with specs equivalent to $500-class tablets.
Tied to a B&N-only app ecosystem, obviously worthless.
Yeah, that $269 tablet is appealing. I wouldn’t want to be tied to the B&N ecosystem either, but at least they are adding a video streaming service to complete with Netflix.
These look kinda spectacular. I particularly like the user profiles they implemented. I would never buy a nook or kindle tablet personally except to hack it with pure android, but I can see why others would.
My SD based hacked Nook tablet is awesome. I have zero problems with it and don’t have to deal with a crippled OS like with the standard nook and kindle.
Supposedly the display is close to retina quality for less money. I have a gifted one coming to me on Nov 1, so I’ll post impressions. Nook has a fairly robust hacking community.
This is ironic since what killed the original nook for me was that I couldn’t buy books while outside the us. I guess they worked that out in the past few years…
In a slight quandary, and I hope someone might be able to help. My girlfriend has just received a Nook which was bought in the US, however she lives in the UK. At the moment she can’t register a card to purchase ebooks as she doesn’t have a US billing. However, the Nook is being released in the UK in about 10 days time.
I’ve just had the most unhelpful conversation I’ve ever had with a customer service person (she essentially gave me a link to the press release for the UK launch - naturally useless), so am considering options.
It sounds like some people have had luck with international purchases so I was wondering how!
I was poking around on some Black Friday sites and I saw that the Nook Simple Touch is going to be a doorbuster sale at Target and Sears, both of which open Thanksgiving night. At Target it’s going to be $49 and at Sears it’s going to be $40.
The Nook HD+ that I got my wife back in 2013 seems to have stopped working. When we plug in the proprietary charging cable, it stays at 0% charge. Is there a way of narrowing down whether I want a new cable or a new battery for the Nook?
Here’s the behavior:
When I plug it in, the light becomes light green for a second, and then becomes orange. That usually means it’s charging when everything was working correctly. However, the screen shows an empty battery even after an hour or two, and the charger itself, the portion that’s plugged into the socket, that part has become really hot.
Now that charger itself, I use that part to charge my phone sometimes, so I know that part is still good. So it’s either the cable that goes from USB to Nook, or the Nook Battery. From what I’ve seen on the internet, when it’s the cable, the light on the Nook stays green when you plug it in, and doesn’t become orange.
So i figure it’s pretty safe to assume I need a new battery, given the evidence, right?
That said, isn’t the (more or less sole) big advantage of Nook the ability to bring it into a B&N and have them dicker around with it? I’m sure they’d have an extra cable laying around to test with.
Neat. I didn’t know you could do that. I haven’t been in a Barnes and Noble since the early 2000s. I miss that store. Great idea Armando! I’ll give it a try.
