A while ago I decided that I wanted a cheap e-reader that could display PDFs reasonably. That meant most e-ink displays were out (most screens were too small, and the larger ones were too expensive). Instead, I looked through the various cheap tablets that were available. Most had pretty low resolutions, but the Nook HD+ stood out as a potential solution since it had much better specs than any comparable tablets (probably it’s a loss leader for Barnes and Noble).
I’ve now owned mine for a few months. After trying a bunch of different syncing solutions and readers, I’ve mostly settled on PDF Reader/Moon+ for reading and Calibre/Calibre Companion library management.
Thoughts:
It’s reskinned with a highly crappy UI for no apparent reason. This makes common tasks (like changing which apps appear on the home screen) unreasonably difficult to someone used to standard Android.
Either the crappy UI is also un-optimized, or the Nook processor is really bad, but various drawing operations aren’t smooth at all.
I think this poor user experience causes me to read noticeably less than I would if I had a nicer reader (e.g. a Kindle), though I’m not sure.
Syncing ebooks between PC and Nook is non-trivial. I’ve been using Calibre’s wireless sync feature because OS X hates Android by default, but the wireless sync took a fair amount of fiddling to set up (specifically I think the Nook failed to auto-discover the sync server and I had to manually enter the IP).
I was expecting annotation to be easier on the Nook than on a Kindle (since it has a better keyboard and more responsive UI), but it’s not enough to cause me to actually use annotation. Then again, I was never a big annotator of paper books either.
Overall, I’m not sure this setup is better than a Kindle + reading textbooks on my computer.