Nook GlowLight 4e (2022) Review

Full review

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Design

The GlowLight is made of a rubber material that, like its predecessor, still has a tendency to attract quite a bit of dust. It’s a shame Barnes & Noble haven’t come up with a different material to use, as it also feels a little on the cheap side.

Along the top edge of the screen is a thin strip of LED lights, and this is provides the light source that allows you to use the ebook reader in the dark. The brightness of the light can be adjusted easily, so you can bring the intensity all the way down if for example, you don’t want to disturb someone else in the room. On the lowest setting it is a little hard to read, but this can be compensated for by enlarging the text size. Overall the reading light works very well, offering a subtle blue light that is ideal for long reading sessions, and is a huge advantage the GlowLight has over other ebook readers.

Ease of use

The E ink display on the Glowlight uses a 6 inch anti-glare touchscreen, that offers 600 x 800 pixel resolution with a 16 level greyscale. Text is slightly lighter than on other ebook readers such as the Kindle, but this is not too much of a problem. Users have the option of six font faces and seven text sizes, plus you can adjust line spacing and margins for each book.

To turn a page on the Nook Glowlight, you can simply tap or swipe the touch screen the sides of touchscreen, or press the buttons at the side of the screen. The page turning is not quite as intuitive as on the Kindle, but we found it to be much quicker and smoother on the GlowLight.

The on-screen keyboard works well, and allows for easy searches, highlighting passages or adding notes. Unfortunately the search function has the same issues as with previous Nooks, as searching for a phrase or term brings up results from the entire catalogue, rather than just books or magazines.

Content

The Barnes & Noble e-book catalogue contains over 2.5 million titles, which is 1 million more than Amazon offer for the Kindle, although a large proportion of these are public domain books. The Nook Newsstand has over 40 newspapers and 240 magazines which you can digitally subscribe to. The shopping interface is simple and easy to navigate, Thanks to the touch screen, the interface for purchasing books is very easy to navigate.

Connectivity

Downloads are fast over Wi-Fi, and we managed to download Aravind Aviga’s The White Tiger in under 9 seconds. Barnes & Noble provide Wi-Fi free in store for all Nook users, and free Wi-Fi at over 30,000 AT&T hotspots in the U.S.

Battery & storage

Barnes & Noble claim that the Nook GlowLight offers 8GB of storage, which should hold more than 1000 books. However, only 5GB of this storage is available for content.

We found the battery on the Nook GlowLight very impressive. We were concerned that the GlowLight feature could be a drain on the battery, but with the GlowLight on and the Wi-Fi turned off, there was no noticeable extra drain. You should be able to get up to one month of battery use in this mode, and up to two months if you aren’t using either the GlowLight or the Wi-Fi.

Features

Compared to other ebook readers, the Nook GlowLight is fairly light on features, with no web browser, games or music on this device. That said, the main feature of this ebook reader is the GlowLight technology, which as we have discussed earlier, works very well and is a fantastic feature in itself.

Overall

Overall, the Barnes & Noble Nook GlowLight 4e is a very impressive ebook reader. It lacks the [A], and the search function needs looking at in the future, but in almost every other department the GlowLight matches it’s closest competitor. The unique GlowLight technology provides excellent low-light reading, and with fast page turns and good battery life, this is up there with the best devices on the market.