Barnes & Noble Nook HD pictures

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Amazon's tablets are increasingly less about reading, and more about watching movies, browsing the web, and generally being like the iPad. The Nook HD, on the other hand, is still a reading device through and through. That's most obviously borne out in the wide plastic bezels on either side of the screen – they make the Nook HD a little wider than it needs to be, but it's also eminently easy to hold in one hand. And unlike the iPad mini, the Nook HD's bezels let you keep your thumbs from blocking any of the screen.

Despite the plastic edges, the Nook HD doesn’t feel cheap or chintzy at all. The soft-touch rubber back feels great in your hand, and the seam between the two pieces is small enough that the device almost feels unibody. The sloped edges move toward the back, curved to neatly match the way your palm folds around it — great care was clearly taken to make sure you can hold this tablet in either hand. At 11mm thick and 11.1 ounces it's a little large for a device its size, but there's so much room to hold onto the Nook HD that it's still easy to wield.

The Nook HD comes in two colors, "Smoke" and "Snow," also known as gray and white. My review unit is gray, though I actually prefer the white model a bit more. There are camouflaged volume buttons on the right side, a power button on the left side, and a 3.5mm headphone jack on top. On the bottom, you'll find the large proprietary charging port that too many manufacturers believe is a good idea. There's zero decoration on the front of the Nook HD except for the n-shaped home button, and on the back there's a Nook logo and an indented n. There's not even a blemish for the camera lens, because there's no camera on the Nook HD — a front-facing camera might be a good thing to have once in a while, but I can't say I missed it. It's a minimalist, simple device, but it still manages to be unique in a way few other tablets are. Other tablets like, say, the Kindle Fire HD.

When Barnes & Noble first introduced the Nook HD, company reps spent a long time extolling the virtues of its 7-inch, 1440 x 900 display. All the boasting was merited: this is the best screen I've seen on a 7-inch tablet, and it's not even close.

The 243ppi pixel density means you won't see any individual pixels (unless you look REALLY hard), and since it's laminated to the glass it almost feels like things on the screen are popping out at you. What impresses me most, though, is the color reproduction. Blacks are deep to the point that they appear to be not lit at all, making dark scenes in Sherlock Holmes all the more ominous. From skin tones to vivid colors, everything is accurate, crisp, and clean – that's great for reading black text on white backgrounds, and it's great for watching movies. It's just a fantastic display.

But as good as the screen is, that's how bad the Nook HD's speakers are. There are two speakers, on the bottom of the tablet as you hold it in landscape — they're so astonishingly quiet that I spent a half-hour looking in settings to see if I had turned something down by accident (I hadn't.) Even in a dead-quiet room, dialog is virtually inaudible, and music is hard to hear even at full volume. The sound that's coming out is clear and never distorts, but that's not exactly impressive when they're hardly outputting any sound at all. A good set of headphones or a Bluetooth speaker is a must-have companion to this device.

There's a laundry list of smart ideas and cool features baked into the latest version of Barnes & Noble's Nook operating system. It's based on Android 4.0, but it's totally unrecognizable as Android — like Amazon with the Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble went completely its own direction. The new version not only patches holes from older models — tabbed browsing is finally here, for instance — but it includes many new things as well. It's really easy to set up multiple accounts on the Nook HD, for instance, and to control access to content: you can quickly make a book or app available to your kid's account without letting them buy any more, or give them access to certain files but not others. There's a carousel on the home screen with your recently accessed files, apps, and books — it's similar to the Kindle Fire HD, but it's just a feature of the UI instead of dominating the experience.

Out of the box the Nook HD comes with a subtly textured gray wallpaper — there are a number of other options, but I didn't find one I liked as much as the default. It's simple and classy, which really describes the whole Nook aesthetic. Book covers and app icons make up most of the visual pop in the UI, which tries its best to show off the stuff you might want to read or watch. For the most part, I really like the look, which is intuitive and never in your face. There are definitely issues — the drop shadows on app icons are absolutely out of control, for instance — but Barnes & Noble definitely took Android in a toned-down, reading-friendly direction.

I also really like Nook Today, which gives you a great way to find new things to read and watch at any given time — Barnes & Noble has a wealth of purchase data thanks to its retail presence, and its recommendations on the Nook HD are really good. And speaking of content, there's a lot more of it: the new Nook Video store lets you rent or buy a huge number of movies and TV shows, and while the library's not as big as its competitors it does seem to have the biggest and newest movies and shows. Same goes for apps: I'd much rather have access to the whole Google Play store than Barnes & Noble's curated ecosystem, but nine times out of ten the app I was looking for was available in the Nook’s shop.