Barnes & Noble has updated its NOOK app for Android phones and tablets, giving virtually any Android tablet much of the same functionality you’d expect if you purchased a NOOK Color device.

NOOK 2.6.1 for Android can run on any device with Android 2.1 and up, but you get a few special features if you install the app on an Android tablet with a high resolution display, including the ability to purchase magazine subscriptions or individual issues.

Barnes & Noble offers 140 magazines and newspapers, including National Geographic, The Economist, Rolling Stone and PC Magazine, as well as a good selection of the titles you’d normally find in the grocery store checkout such as Cosmo, US Weekly and Star. You can get a 14-day free trial of any newspaper or magazine. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any way to cancel a subscription from within the app. You’ll have to login to the Barnes & Noble web site and view your account settings to do that.

You can read magazines in landscape or portrait mode, and use an ArticleView settings to strip most images from an article and view the text. This doesn’t sound all that impressive until you download a magazine such as National Geographic and realize just how much of the magazine is filled with advertisements which you can skip past by using the ArticleView setting.

Tablet users also get a new grid-style layout for their content library and better book margins and line spacing.

Magazines and newspapers aren’t available for Android smartphones, but the latest version of the app does contain some bug fixes.

NOOK for Android is available as a free download from the Android Market.

Brad Linder

Brad Linder is editor of Liliputing and Mobiputing. He's been tinkering with mobile tech for decades and writing about it since...