Why You Can Trust CNET Barnes & Noble Nook GlowLight Plus review: Barnes & Noble's answer to the Kindle Paperwhite is fully waterproof
Barnes & Noble finally has a new e-reader with a sharper E Ink display, a capacitive touchscreen, a built-in ambient light and full waterproofing for $130.
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After taking a beating with its Nook tablets, Barnes & Noble smartly retreated and stopped making its own hardware, opting instead to sell Samsung tablets with a custom Nook interface, plus full access to the Google Play Store.
Barnes & Noble Nook GlowLight Plus
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Meanwhile, it kept selling its dedicated Nook GlowLight e-readers without updating them for two years. Badly in need of a refresh, it's finally here,. The all-new waterproof Nook GlowLight Plus is now available for $130 with no ads.
Designed in-house by the bookseller, it retains the white front bezel of its predecessor, but it's a sleeker looking unit. It features a 300 dots-per-inch E Ink display with enhanced contrast and twice as many pixels as the Nook GlowLight (text and images do pop a little more); Barnes & Noble says it's on par with the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite's screen.
Like Amazon, Barnes & Noble has moved from an infrared-based touchscreen to a more responsive capacitive touchscreen (Amazon's entry-level Kindle still uses infrared but both the Paperwhite and Voyage have more advanced touchscreens.) It's also improved the built-in light so it splays across the screen with more uniformity and is brighter at its highest setting.
The back of the unit is made out of aluminum, not plastic, which gives the e-reader a more premium feel. However, the GlowLight Plus weighs slightly more than the GlowLight -- 6.9 versus 6.2 ounces.
I have a couple of small design gripes. First, the outside of the bezel (the aluminum part) has a little bit of an edge to it. I missed the grippy, soft-to-the-touch finish of the Nook GlowLight. And like the iPhone, the new Nook's aluminum chassis is so smooth it's a little slippery, although the border around the display is nicely textured (you're supposed to hold the device with your thumb on the border, but not everybody likes to hold their e-reader that way).
Putting the GlowLight Plus in a case is probably a good idea -- Barnes & Noble has a new line of them. I tried out a straightforward navy blue case; it didn't add much weight and I felt comfortable holding the Nook in hand, though I did still catch a little bit of the edge of the chassis that I was talking about.
The Kindle Paperwhite has no physical buttons on the device beyond an on/off button. The Nook's pretty minimalist too, and like the earlier GlowLight, has no physical page-turn buttons, which some people like but others consider superfluous (the Kindle Voyage has touch-sensitive page-turn buttons on the bezel).
The Nook retains its "n" shaped home button at the bottom of the e-reader, but it's now become a touch-sensitive button rather than a mechanical button you press down. It's worth noting that on the earlier GlowLight you could hold the button down to turn on the light -- or turn it off if it was already on. This "n" button appears to be strictly a home button (you control the light by touching the light icon at the top of the screen and adjust the light's level with a slider).
Along with the new hardware, Barnes & Noble has streamlined the Nook's software and, as a result, the new e-reader does feel zippier, with the capacitive touch also helping to improve its responsiveness. Its iOS and Android apps have been updated too.
From a hardware standpoint, the one competitive advantage the new Nook has over the Kindle Paperwhite is that it's waterproof and dust-proof. Barnes & Noble asked for feedback from its customers and they said they wanted a more durable device that they could use "at the beach, in the bathtub or alongside the pool without worry." Kobo has a waterproof e-reader, the Aura H2O , but this is the first one to come from Barnes & Noble or Amazon.
It's IP67 rated, which means it can handle being submerged in up to 3 feet of water for 30 minutes. We put it in a container full of water in a kitchen sink and left Nook underwater for several minutes. It survived just fine.
I was told that you get 2.5GB of free space, which should allow you to store thousands of e-books. Battery life is rated at up to six weeks on a single charge, but you'll have to turn off the Wi-Fi to get that. And the processor gets a slight bump up to 1GHz.
The company notes that the GlowLight Plus is its first e-reader to include B&N Readouts, a new feature that "leverages Barnes & Noble's vast content catalog and deep bookseller knowledge to deliver a daily selection of addictive and compelling quick reads that can be enjoyed anytime and anywhere."
And lest we forget, Barnes & Noble's still has nearly 650 brick-and-mortar stores across the country and you can take your Nook into any one of them for free lifetime in-store support, as well as connect to the free in-store Wi-Fi to read Nook Books for up to an hour a day at no cost.
Finally, it's worth mentioning that the flashing you typically get from e-ink-based e-readers has been eliminated -- at least while you're reading a book. With e-ink, the screen needs to refresh every so often, which is what causes the flash. When you go back to the home screen, the display does flash, but it seems less jarring because you're not in the middle of turning a page while reading.
Kindle comparisons
I compared the Nook GlowLight Plus to the Kindle Paperwhite primarily focusing on the two displays. I maxed out the brightness on both e-readers and the two definitely look different. The uniformity of the lighting is good with both models, though Kindle's is perhaps slightly better, but that may be due to the LEDs placement. The Nook's LEDs are at the top edge of the screen while the Kindle are at the bottom. When lit, the Nook's display has a bit more of a blueish tinge to it while the Kindle's looks closer to that of the printed page of a book.
Contrast also seemed to be a bit better on the Paperwhite (text appeared slightly darker). The differences aren't huge, and if I didn't have a Paperwhite on hand to make comparisons, I wouldn't have anything critical to say about the Nook's screen. But side-by-side I preferred the Kindle's display; it comes out slightly ahead.
I'm not going to spend much time comparing Amazon's e-reading ecosystem to Barnes & Noble's other than to say that Barnes & Noble's is quite good but Amazon's is best-in-class. Amazon also offers plenty of added incentives for anyone who pays for the Amazon Prime program ($99 per year), including free "library" loaners from Amazon's collection.
Unlike Amazon Kindles, the Nook can be used to read EPUB files purchased from third-party retailers beyond Barnes & Noble. It can also read PDFs (though anyone who's doing serious PDF reading should opt for a tablet instead). And Barnes & Noble also offers a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, too.
The latest Nooks have offered support for side-loading library books with your Adobe ID, but that support isn't available quite yet in this new model with its revamped software. By late November Barnes & Noble is scheduled to add support for Adobe DRM EPUB files and PDFs through a software update over Wi-Fi. That update will also include improved Web log-in portal management (Wi-Fi hotspots, public Wi-Fi, hotels, etc.), enhancements to the In-Store Wi-Fi experience, as well as additional bug fixes and improvements.
Conclusion
The new Nook GlowLight probably isn't going to make any converts out of Amazon's Kindle customers, but at least Barnes & Noble now has an e-reader with competitive specs and performance to the Paperwhite. It also signals to its customers that it's still committed to the Nook platform. That may help the company reach existing Barnes & Noble customers who haven't bought an e-reader yet or are sitting on an older Nook and may now be interested in upgrading.