The Reader's Tablet strikes again. The Barnes & Noble Nook HD ($199 for 8GB, $229 for 16GB) has the best hardware of any 7-inch tablet in its price class. It's light and well built, with a grippy body and an absolutely stellar screen. As long as you use it to read Barnes & Noble's books, it's spectacular. But tablets nowadays do a lot more than that, and the Nook HD doesn't. That makes the Nook HD a great reader's tablet, but not a leading tablet overall. 

Design and Storage

The Barnes & Noble Nook HD is a pleasure to hold in the hand. It comes in gray and white. At 7.65 by 5 by .43 inches (HWD) and 11.1 ounces, it's narrower than the Amazon Kindle Fire HD but slightly wider than the Google Nexus 7 SEE IT, and the whole thing is covered in a tactile gray material with a bezel just the right size for wrapping your fingers around.

The Nook HD's screen is distinctly better than the Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7—or for that matter, the Apple iPad Mini. It's the best small-tablet screen available right now. That's not just about the tight 1,440-by-900-pixel resolution, which makes text sharper than on the other tablets. The screen is also noticeably less reflective and has deeper blacks than either the Kindle's or Nexus's screens, which makes reading easier. The viewing angle is the best I've seen on a tablet so far. I thought I loved the Kindle Fire HD's screen; this one is better.

On the bottom is a microSD card slot, which takes up to 64GB cards, along with an annoying, proprietary charging port. Barnes & Noble says it'll have an HDMI-out cable for the Nook HD in the future, but that still compares poorly to the Kindle Fire HD's more standard micro HDMI port. There's also a relatively quiet speaker. The headphone jack is on the top.

The microSD card lets the Nook HD store a lot more data than competing $199 tablets, but its utility is limited by what you can play. The Nook HD plays MP3 and AAC music files, and MPEG4 and H.264 videos. The tablet can also view unprotected ePub-formatted eBooks, CBZ-formatted comics, PDFs, and Microsoft Office documents stored on a memory card, but they're buried two levels down in the Library screen.

DivX and Xvid videos are out, and you can't sideload apps. Although the ePub and CBZ support is welcome, there are no alternative video players or book readers in the Nook store to display content not downloaded from Barnes & Noble, so support for third-party formats falls well short of the Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7.

Battery life, at 5 hours 16 minutes of video playback with the screen at full brightness, was noticeably shorter than the 7 hours I got on the Kindle Fire HD.

Performance and Apps

The Nook HD runs a TI OMAP 4470 processor at 1.3GHz, which is considerably faster than the processor in the Kindle Fire HD. I couldn't run our benchmarks on the tablet, but page turns were smoother, applications loaded more quickly, and there were fewer delays as page thumbnails loaded than I saw on the Kindle Fire HD. Casual games like Bad Piggies and Fruit Ninja played smoothly. 

This is a Wi-Fi-only tablet with 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, but not the 5GHz support featured on the Kindle Fire HD. That's important because the Nook's HD video files are often quite large, so they'd have benefitted from 5GHz Wi-Fi's faster download times.

Like the Kindle Fire HD, the Nook HD runs a heavily altered, basically unrecognizable version of Android 4.0. It's even simpler and more pared-down than the Kindle's interface. When you turn on your Nook, you get the option to choose between your user profiles—I'll explain those below. Then you see a screen with a configurable "shelf" of your favorite apps and five options: Library, Apps, Web, Email, and Shop. That's it.

Hitting a button at the top of the screen pops down Your Nook Today, which gives you the weather and some shopping suggestions based on what you've been reading.

The Library is, essentially, the file list, both of your B&N content and the stuff from your memory card. The Web browser is a skinned version of the Android 4.0 browser. It has a neat reader-style "article view" option and the ability to save pages offline, and it had comparable performance to the Nexus 7. There's no Flash, but that's becoming less important nowadays.

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