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I went to a B&N to look at the nook plus in person. Had my paper white 2 with me.
Aesthetically, it looked quite nice. Alas, it is terrible for me to hold. The aluminum(?) back is very slippery. Worse: the metal on the side protrudes slightly above the front bezel, creating a sharp edge all around. I couldn't use this thing without some sort of back cover. (Maybe that's their plan!) The old glow light on the next table looked a bit toy like by comparison, but it was much nicer to hold.
The screen is flush with the bezel, albeit not seamlessly. The bezel is a different material and has a cross hatch texture. This is good, bad, or indifferent depending on your pov. Going by memory, the flush screen on the voyage is nicer but of course it's in a different price category.
I turned the lights up on the nook and my PW until they glowed and turned them back down so they stopped glowing. Both screens' background looked very similar. I didn't see any obvious uniformity problem, given the fluorescent light in the store.
The increased resolution over my PW was noticeable and looked quite nice. Georgia and even a couple of sans serif fonts looked very useable to me (I don't like any of the kindle fonts and always load my own.) Thankfully, you can change to minimal left right margins. I don't know why they use huge margins in their ads so the reader looks like 3/5 bezel and blank space. Found no way to turn off the header/footer so lots of wasted space on top and bottom. Aesthetically, it looks nice, I guess. Functionally, I prefer more actual book text.
It has the same font stepping problem as the kindle, where there is a single size change that goes from a bit too small to way too big. What's especially stupid is it does not have eight laid out choices like the kindle but +/- buttons, so in theory they could have had every size from 6 to 60, but no they can't have people tapping too many times so instead they fixed it to eight sizes or whatever. They could've used a slider but I guess that was too much trouble. Sigh. It's a fine line between simple and stupid. Maybe there are work arounds.
Speed looks fine. Menu, page turns, etc are all very responsive.
Unfortunately, it is very noticeable the "ink" on the nook is not as dark as the pw2. It is tricky to say for sure because the lower resolution on the pw2 and my custom fonts make everything look bolder and perhaps as a result darker, but after looking very carefully and comparing not just the text but things like lines in the menu and the scrubber, I think the pw2 sites have darker blacks. For me, contrast is the most important attribute in a display and I'll take contrast over a bump in resolution, provided the resolution isn't terrible to begin with, which the pw2's is not.
(Wish I'd had a camera.)
I think it's a solid product by B&N but it is not for me.
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