More Thoughts on the Nook HD

Since I’ll never get around to writing a full blown review, I’m going to type some more of my impressions of Barnes and Noble’s 7” Android based tablet. Video playback, book reading, and the child friendly nature of the Nook HD will be covered.

The screen is even more phenomenal than I first thought. One of the knocks on color LCD tablets is that you can’t read them in bright sunlight, unlike the E-ink based readers. To my shock, this is not true with the Nook HD. All you have to do is up the brightness to maximum and it will do just fine. I tested this by reading while being in very bright sunlight surrounded by white snow – and wearing sunglasses which make LCD reading very hard.

Now I no longer covet having a simple Kindle or Nook for bright days. This is huge because I primarily use my other tablet for reading. It being so lightweight makes reading on it a joy.

Video playback has been an interesting odyssey. Things look fantastic on the display with the difference between high and low definition sources being very noticeable. Streaming has been an interesting experience due to the closed environment of B&N.

Hulu Plus is one of the default apps and is highly temperamental. Loops during commercials make it nearly unusable and an updated version can get you past that only to lose the server and go into infinite buffering. It is a notoriously bad app, but actually works better on the Nook HD than anything else I’ve seen. When it works, it does provide true HD streams if you have a paid account like I do.

Crackle has been the big surprise. No HD, but it actually works without issue unlike my other tablet. On that one it behaves like Hulu Plus and loops endlessly on the first commercial. My suspicions is that behavior all has to do with DRM, which has bloated to become the bane of entertainment enjoyment.

I haven’t rented an HD movie from B&N yet, but may before this post is finished. Yeah, I’m being lazy and writing this over time.

I tried some ripped DVDs in MKV format and they play just fine with one minor and one major issue. The minor issue is the inability of the player to pick up the embedded subtitles, so ripping will require hard burning them. MX Player does pick them up.

Note: I have flashed the Nook HD to allow side loading apps and other stores, but have not rooted it. So some of the apps mentioned will not be available to the average user. To get this to work is not easy and involves formatting and flashing a MicroSD card, which limits it to the technically inclined.

The show stopper is that it doesn’t scale the video up except in a rudimentary way on my 1080p HDTV through the HDMI adapter. Both the default player, MX Player, and Mobo Player did not produce an acceptable picture in my opinion. Changing between hardware and software made no difference for HDMI out. It did for watching it on the tablet’s screen.

This is frustrating to some degree, but the tablet will scale things properly to its own display. A rip of Area 88 looks spectacular on it, but suffers from obvious blockiness when output over HDMI. I’m hoping this changes with some software revisions in the future from B&N.

On to HD content. A rental from B&N provided a good test and a good movie to watch in HD, The Andromeda Strain. Lots of scenery and lots of computer read outs tested the picture properly and I can report it streamed beautifully to the HDTV. Colors were excellent and the picture was nearly Blu-ray quality. But at $5 a rental, I’m not likely to do that again.

From all this experimenting, I can only conclude that the HDMI adaptor passes through content without any upscaling. Instead, it relies on the HDTV to scale lower res content up and mine is terrible at that.

Oh and the first volume of the Bleach manga looks great on 1080p as well as the native display. B&N have done a great job in producing a reader that handles graphic novels just as well as text based ones.

Something that many might consider a negative that I consider a positive about the Nook HD is the limited number of apps in the B&N store. There is good reason for this outside of being a closed environment aimed at getting you to buy from them only. It has to do with a big selling point for the Nook: it is child friendly.

Setting up child safe accounts is easy and this also prevents them from accessing content aimed at adults in the store. Applications are all paid versions with a smattering of true freeware apps and they are all ad free. This is more important for kids than adults, because tapping on ads can lead to issues – not to mention the ad content might be of questionable nature itself.

Web browsing is a great experience on the Nook with most pages rendering and behaving like you were on a PC. With a screen resolution equal to that of a notebook or small laptop, it makes browsing the web in horizontal mode very convenient. I’ve used it to post to Blogger, read and write emails, and check on a wide variety of things. That’s with the default browser and the other web browser available in the B&N store, Dolphin, does a fairly good job too. It benefits from being able to show YouTube videos.

Battery life is good and from what I’ve read, only a hair inferior to the Kindle HD and Google Nexus 7. It is certainly far better than my iView Cypad and that’s not even using airplane mode.

If I were to sum the Nook HD up in one description, it would be that it is a glorified book reader and movie player, or a mobile entertainment center if you wish. That’s what I want out of a 7” tablet, so I’m very happy with it after adding an alternate launcher and apps. Most people wouldn’t need to do that.

For multipurpose uses and gaming, you are probably better off with a Google Nexus 7, but watch that you don’t run out of storage room. While you can get a 16GB model, I have a 32GB MicroSDHC card added to the 8GB of my Nook HD. It is a good thing, since I suspect I’ll be buying more graphic novels from B&N over time and they take up a lot of room.