Barnes & Noble Launches NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ – Lightest, Highest-Resolution 7-Inch HD Tablet and Lightest Full HD Tablet Starting at $199
Barnes & Noble, Inc. on Wednesday introduced NOOK HD and NOOK HD+, claimed to be the lightest HD and full HD tablets. The lightweight 7-inch NOOK HD and 9-inch NOOK HD+ feature displays for superior reading and entertainment and a personalized tablet experience for each family member.
NOOK HD boasts the world’s highest-resolution ever on a 7-inch tablet and NOOK HD+ rivals the industry-leading iPad’s display, starting at $199 for NOOK HD and $269 for NOOK HD+, nearly half the cost of the Apple’s leading large-format tablet.
With more than three million books, a large selection of magazines and apps, and now with newly launched NOOK Video and NOOK Catalog content, NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ offer a wide array of reading and entertainment at customers fingertips. Both are available for pre-order at http://www.nook.com and Barnes & Noble stores to ship beginning in early November.
A Personalized Tablet Experience for Both Individuals and Families
According to research by Barnes & Noble, more than 50 percent of tablet owners share their devices with others in their family every day. Half also say they would never let their child handle their device unattended. Not surprising, given that more than a third of tablet owners report having content on their devices they dont want anyone else to see. NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ are designed precisely to provide a personalized experience for individuals and their family members, allowing children to freely enjoy all the content they love without happening upon all that mom and dad would rather they didnt see. New NOOK Profiles instantly transform the device in hand to any family members very own tablet. With a quick tap on a profile at the top of the screen, the entire experience magically changes into that family members personal tablet as their own content and personalized recommendations appear on the display. Now mom’s NOOK becomes Billy’s NOOK, becomes dad’s NOOK and so on. In a blink, one device is like four, five or six. Adults can use their personal passwords to easily access their books, magazines, videos, apps and more. Children can dive into their collection of digital picture books, learning apps and kid-friendly videos, while tweens and teens can access their chapter books, magazines, games and favorite TV shows. Enhanced controls with simple settings and password features empower parents to easily manage their childrens access to the Web, content and shopping.
Tablet Features
The new NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ are optimized in the areas company research showed NOOK tablet owners use most: reading, Web, video and email, offering beautifully rendered text, magazines in HD and fast page turns. New to the Web, ArticleView allows you to customize your online reading experience. Both NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ offer access to a collection of popular movies and TV shows through new NOOK Video. And an all-new built-in email app offers new features in an easy-to-use, clean format that supports a host of popular personal and work-related email services including Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync.
NOOK HD – Exceptional Reading and Entertainment Experience in a 7-Inch Tablet
NOOK HD includes a newly invented, brilliant display that delivers the highest quality text, graphics and video experience in a 7-inch media tablet. Packed with pixels, NOOK HD offers the claimed highest-resolution display ever on a 7-inch tablet at 1440 x 900, with 243 pixels per inch and HD video playback of up to 720p. It’s ultra-sharp with 25 percent more pixels than Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD. Building on the advanced laminated displays first seen in the 7-inch category on previous NOOK LCD products, NOOK HD features advanced IPS display coupled with optical bonding technology with no air gap to deliver low-glare and a wide viewing angle for sharing.
Weight matters, and B&N claims no other leading 7-inch HD tablet is lighter than NOOK HD. By developing a breakthrough design that integrates the display into the device itself, Barnes & Noble eliminated many components to keep NOOK HD super-light, yet durable. At only 11.1 ounces (315 grams) and just 5-inches wide, it’s more than 20 percent lighter and nearly a half-inch narrower than Kindle Fire HD. So, it fits the hand beautifully and is finished with soft-touch paint that makes it comfortable to hold. NOOK HD is ergonomically contoured for comfort and slips easily into a man’s suit coat, a woman’s handbag or a child’s backpack.
Armed with a dual-core 1.3GHz high-speed processor, NOOK HD is fast, responsive and smooth. With its more powerful processor, NOOK HD is faster than Kindle Fire HD – 80 percent faster when it comes to graphics processing for smoother, faster animations, renderings, apps experience and more. The 1GB of RAM allows users to easily zip from one app to another and play movies.
The tablet is now available for pre-order in two colors, Snow and Smoke. Starting at $199 for an 8GB model and $229 for a 16GB version – both featuring expandable microSD memory storage customers can pre-order at http://www.nook.com and at Barnes & Noble stores.
NOOK HD+ The Lightest and Lowest-Priced Full HD Tablet Ever
For those who want to enjoy reading and entertainment on a larger scale, NOOK HD+ offers a full HD 9-inch display with resolution of 1920 x 1280 and 256 pixels per inch for up to 1080p for movies, magazines and more. The fully laminated display reduces glare and provides excellent viewing angles, perfect for personal or shared viewing. This display rivals the leading New iPad’s high-resolution Retina display, but is offered in a device that’s more than 20 percent less weight and nearly half the price.
Weighing in at 18.2 ounces (515 grams), NOOK HD+ is big on display, yet lightweight, easy to hold and take anywhere – claimed to be the lightest full HD tablet ever invented. NOOK HD+ is powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core processor with 1GB of RAM.
Additional NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ Highlights
• Battery Life that Lasts: Both devices feature extra-long battery life optimized for extended use. NOOK HD offers up to 10.5 hours of continuous reading and up to 9 hours of video watching, while NOOK HD+ boasts up to 10 hours and up to 9 hours for reading and video, respectively, all with Wi-Fi off.
• Expandable Storage: In addition to generous onboard storage, NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ also feature expandable memory using a separate microSD card (up to 64GB) another feature not offered on Amazons tablets. NOOK gives customers an economical and flexible way to carry their personal content, PDFs, music, videos and more anywhere.
• A Better Value, Ad-Free: NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ customers can enjoy their favorite content and personal photos, without annoying ads as with Amazon’s tablets. And with prices starting at $199 and $269 respectively, always ad-free NOOK tablets are a better value than Amazons, which charges customers an additional $15 for freedom from advertising offers on their tablet home page.
• Ready for Power: Barnes & Noble also knows that customers prefer to charge their tablets quickly with an AC adapter, every new NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ has one included at no extra cost. Amazon charges $20 for their tablets adapters sold separately.
• Superb Sound: To deliver excellent audio, NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ are designed with customized speakers and utilize SRS TruMedia* to create a wide sound field, deep bass, clear vocals and strong midrange performance. Whether listening through the devices speakers, a pair of headphones or on a Bluetooth-enabled speaker, customers will enjoy a rich audio experience watching videos, listening to music, reading childrens picture books or playing games.
• A NOOK of Ones Own: Gallery has never been so personal with instant access to cherished memories from popular photo sharing and social networking sites. Customers can add even more photos to the Gallery from their computer or emails. NOOK becomes each family members very own when they pick a favorite photo for the home screen and screensaver for each individual profile instead of annoying ads. NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ also make it easy to share photos via email or in person, by connecting NOOK to a TV.
• Easy to Use New Interface: Both new tablets feature an all-new beautiful paper-like user interface that gets customers right into the content they want, and allows quick access into core applications: Home, Library, Shop and Web. The new experience is intended to make NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ the easiest tablets on the market to use, empowering customers to take advantage of its extensive functionality and enjoy a reading experience that far surpasses that of any other tablets.
• Stay Connected More Easily: The all-new email app on NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ lets customers stay connected with what’s happening at the office through support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. Customers can check business email and sync calendar and contacts, too. NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ also support email, calendar and contacts syncing for popular services like Gmail, Hotmail and Outlook.com, as well other popular POP3/IMAP email services like Yahoo!, AOL and more.
• Experience the entire NOOK family of products at http://www.nook.com or at the NOOK Digital Shops and displays in one of Barnes & Noble’s more than 700 bookstores and other leading retailers including Best Buy, Target and Walmart, which will soon take pre-orders, and many others. Barnes & Noble offers Always Free NOOK Support in all of its neighborhood bookstores, with more than 40,000 NOOKsellers across the country ready to assist customers with setting up their NOOK devices or choosing their next great read.
The NOOK HD+, offered in the color Slate, features expandable memory for even more storage with options of 16GB for $269 and 32GB for $299.
Both NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ will ship in late October and be available in stores in early November.
“With the combination of the highest resolution screen, lightest weight and expansive access to content rendered in a digital quality never before seen, NOOK HD is the worlds best 7-inch media tablet,” says William J. Lynch, Chief Executive Officer of Barnes & Noble. “We designed our larger format tablet NOOK HD+ because we think theres big demand from customers for a super-light, extremely high quality 9-inch tablet, at half the price of the iPad. Both our 7-inch NOOK HD and 9-inch NOOK HD+ deliver an exceptional customer experience and we enthusiastically encourage customers to go to nook.com and learn more about them.”
As part of the launch of NOOK HD and NOOK HD+, Barnes & Noble also announced significant new additions and advancements to the NOOK content ecosystem:
• A Growing and Diverse Digital Catalog: The NOOK Store now offers more than 3 million books including bestselling books, new releases, classics and enhanced titles with special content; the worlds largest collection of nearly 3,500 best-loved English-language childrens interactive picture books; a growing collection of comic books and graphic novels; and picture-perfect art, photography, travel guides and cookbook titles.
• New NOOK Video: Launching concurrently with the shipment of the new products in late October, NOOK Video offers customers their favorite standard and HD movies and TV shows for streaming and download to enjoy in spectacular color and stunning definition on NOOK HD and NOOK HD+. From major studios, networks and companies like HBO, STARZ, The Walt Disney Studios and Warner Bros. Entertainment, the NOOK Video catalog offers something for everyone in the family to enjoy. Customers will find TV favorites such as Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead to movie favorites like Disney-Pixars Brave, The Dark Knight and Harry Potter movies. Both devices are designed with an HDMI compatible port to allow customers to easily connect to their TVs to watch movies and shows in up to full 1080p. Videos streamed and downloaded from the NOOK Store are stored safely and securely in the NOOK Cloud, so NOOK Video content can also be viewed on NOOK devices, TVs, smartphones and tablets via a suite of new free NOOK Video apps. Like free NOOK Reading apps, all-new NOOK Video apps automatically sync so customers can pick up watching right where they left off on the compatible device of their choosing.
• UltraViolet Support: NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ are the first UltraViolet-enabled tablets, so right out of the box they seamlessly integrate a customers compatible physical DVD and Blu-ray Disc purchases and digital video collection across their devices. Customers will be able to easily link their UltraViolet accounts to the NOOK Cloud allowing them to view their previously and newly purchased UltraViolet-enabled movies and TV shows across NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ devices, NOOK Video apps and third-party applications. In addition to purchasing a digital version via NOOK Video, customers can shop for DVDs and Blu-ray Discs with the UltraViolet logo in Barnes & Noble and other retail stores, add them to their digital collection, and instantly watch compatible titles from the NOOK Cloud to enjoy wherever they go and however they choose.
• Magazine 2.0: NOOK Newsstand has the largest digital collection of the top 100 bestselling magazines available for both digital subscriptions and single copy sale. With NOOK HD and NOOK HD+, the industry-leading magazine experience just got even better. A new visual table of contents lets customers view thumbnails of the entire magazine and simply tap the article they want to read first. Magazines feature a super-fast, 3D-like page turn and include built-in hot spots for readers to quickly jump to specific articles and go deeper on a subject or story through audio, video and Web linking. NOOKs innovative ArticleView lets the reader focus only on the text, customized to their needs. The company also introduced a breakthrough NOOK Scrapbook, where magazine readers can virtually clip pages of interest and save them in customized digital scrapbooks.
• All-New Newspaper Experience: Extra! Extra! NOOK Newspapers have an all-new design on NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ that make it even easier and more fun to read newspapers digitally. Customers can view and choose each of the papers sections on the left column to tap and read in a snap. The large selection of daily and weekly newspapers are available through subscription or single copies and are automatically downloaded via Wi-Fi to the device when available for reading with morning coffee, on the commute home or anywhere in between.
• New NOOK Catalog: NOOK Catalog offers a convenient browsing and shopping experience through a selection of colorful, complimentary catalogs from leading retailers including Pottery Barn, L.L.Bean, Frontgate, Garnet Hill and Harry & David with 100 top catalogs available this holiday. Customers catalogs are delivered magically to their devices when published so they can virtually flip through the pages to explore, tap on a product of interest for more information from the retailers Web site and make a purchase. The new NOOK Scrapbook feature can also be used to rip and save select pages in a personalized collection along with other chosen pages saved from catalogs and magazines.
• Top Apps: The global developer community has quickly been innovating and adding to the catalog of high-quality NOOK Apps. The number of NOOK Apps has grown 10x in the last year and 100x since launching and includes all the most popular and bestselling top 100 app titles for tablets available anywhere. NOOK Apps features a wide range of titles for the whole family, including the hottest games, as well as lifestyle, productivity, news, entertainment and reading apps. In fact, only the NOOK Store provides helpful age recommendations for parents and lets customers browse by subject area to find the perfect app for their child among the broadest and the most curated app collection of kids educational apps on any Android store. With games and activities focused on language, math, puzzles, reading, art and more, NOOK provides families with hours of playful learning that helps kids make the most of their screen time.
• Newly Revamped NOOK Store A Better Way to Shop & Find Content: NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ bring a new level of personal shopping service to the device experience. Customers can tap on the Your NOOK Today icon on the home screen to reveal fresh content and personalized recommendations each day. This includes their latest newsstand subscriptions delivered virtually, plus cool apps and new titles matched to their profile.
• The new store experience allows customers to easily shop by department or explore new NOOK Channels, a pioneering recommendation system that combines the unrivaled knowledge of Barnes & Noble booksellers with advanced algorithmic technology to create an unparalleled, curated browsing experience. Targeted by interest and sensibility, each NOOK Channel programs a rich stream of reading and soon movies and apps that includes the latest releases as well as backlist gems, bestsellers as well as offbeat treasures. Customers can browse and shop Channels that will expand their passions for the authors and subjects they love, from Paranormal Romance, War Stories, and Books to Talk About to Jane Austen & Heirs, The New Classics, History by Plot and Books Every Kid Should Know.
• NOOK Cloud: All NOOK content is delivered via Wi-Fi and safely stored through NOOK Cloud, making NOOK Books, videos, apps and other content accessible across NOOK, personal computing and mobile devices using free NOOK Reading and NOOK Video apps.
Pre-orders for NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ will begin next month for customers in the United Kingdom, as the products will be available there through leading retailers and http://www.nook.co.uk in late November.
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