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Nook HD and Nook HD+ gain Google Play Store access

The Nook HD and HD+ are certainly capable Android tablets, but they’ve been missing one key component: the Google Play Store. No longer will owners have to suffer without Google’s wares, as Barnes & Noble has announced that the Play Store will be pushed to the tablets in an over-the-air update. The company will also add the Chrome browser into the mix, turning the Nook HD and HD+ into pretty attractive propositions.

Previously the tablets relied on Barnes & Noble’s own app store, a market that served up a sliver of the available apps on Google Play. Now owners will be able to access the roughly 700,000 apps available on the Play Store, not to mention the music, magazines, and movies that Google also offers. Despite the addition of the feature rich Play Store, Barnes and Noble won’t be shutting down its own app store.

Better yet, the Nook HD and HD+ have also seen recent price cuts in an effort to compete with Amazon’s range of tablets. The Nook HD now costs £129, featuring a 7-inch IPS display with a 1440×900 resolution. There’s also a dual-core OMAP 4470 processor clocked at 1.3Ghz, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage, and a microSD card slot. The Nook HD+, meanwhile, has been reduced to £179. Specs for that model include a 9-inch 1920×1280 IPS display, the same OMAP processor clocked at 1.5Ghz, and 1GB of RAM, along with a slight bump of storage capacity to 16GB.

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