With barely a thousand apps on board, Barnes & Noble's app store is puny compared to the Amazon Appstore, which launched in March with 3,800 apps on board. But of the slim pickings in the Nook app store most are useful, high-quality ones that show off the new Nook Tablet's ($249) and Nook Color's gorgeous high-resolution, 7-inch LCD multi-touch display.
The Nook Tablet, like the Amazon Kindle Fire, runs a very highly customized version of Android 2.3 on a TI OMAP4, 1GHz dual-core processor, making it difficult to interchange apps between the two tablets without rooting them first. Furthermore the Nook's user interface looks nothing like Amazon's (or, for that matter, Android's).
Furthermore unlike the Nook Tablet's popular rival, the Amazon Kindle Fire ($199, Editor's Choice), the Nook Tablet partitions 15GB of the 16GB of onboard RAM. In other words, you can only use this space to store content purchased from Barnes & Noble unless you buy an extra 32GB MicroSD card to sideload third-party apps. "Most of the app store is filled with games or children apps, but Barnes & Noble has said it will ramp up options in fashion, cooking, travel, and health over the next few months.
Until then, we've gone through nearly every one to give you the 15 best apps in the Nook app store, a list that will hopefully expand as Barnes & Noble adds more. Whether you're a hardcore news junkie, a social networking nut, a type-A workaholic, a video game addict, an intellectual curioso, or all of the above, there's something for everyone here.
Furthermore unlike the Nook Tablet's popular rival, the Amazon Kindle Fire ($199, Editor's Choice), the Nook Tablet partitions 15GB of the 16GB of onboard RAM. In other words, you can only use this space to store content purchased from Barnes & Noble unless you buy an extra 32GB MicroSD card to sideload third-party apps. "Most of the app store is filled with games or children apps, but Barnes & Noble has said it will ramp up options in fashion, cooking, travel, and health over the next few months.
Until then, we've gone through nearly every one to give you the 15 best apps in the Nook app store, a list that will hopefully expand as Barnes & Noble adds more. Whether you're a hardcore news junkie, a social networking nut, a type-A workaholic, a video game addict, an intellectual curioso, or all of the above, there's something for everyone here.
Contacts Plus
$1.99
This is a very simple, very useful little app. It imports contacts (and birthdays!) from your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and email accounts and lets you send your PDFs, text files, pictures, or any other files stored on your Nook Tablet. Even records who Liked or commented on what. Great way to share Nook content to non-Nook users.
Doodle Snake
$0.99
Remember when the only game you could play on your dumb phone was Snake? Doodle Snake gives the old school game a thoroughly modern makeover that incorporates crisp graphics and motion sensor control. Highly addictive. 
Evernote
Free
Evernote, a mainstay on must-have apps lists and PCMag Editors' Choice pick among note-taking and organization apps, lets you draft text notes, record and save audio notes, upload images and photos taken on the spot, and organize all these files into "notebooks."
Express News Premium
$1.99
This app aggregates news articles from top-notch newswires like the Associated Press, Canadian Press, and STAT, and delivers them to you in a slick, user-friendly interface that reminds me of Pulse. No setup required—just launch and absorb. 
FriendCaster for Facebook
$1.99
Until Facebook launches its own Facebook Chat app for the Nook, FriendCaster is a solid user-friendly alternative. You can even pin a Facebook chat to your bottom toolbar for continuous updates as you use other apps.
Moon Phase Pro
$0.99
If, like me, you live in a city of bright lights and skyscrapers, you can't always appreciate the glow of the moon. Moon Phase Pro offers detailed, 3D photos of the moon as seen from your GPS coordinates. Check the moon's phases, angles, rise and set times, and nearest syzygies (the alignment of three celestial objects, such as the sun, Earth, moon, or planet). Gorgeous. 
My6sense
Free
There are a lot of usability problems with this content aggregator, but I added it to the list because of its potential—and because, honestly, at only 1,000 apps in the store, pickings are a little slim. My6Sense is a personalized news reader that delivers content to you based on what you Tweet, post on Facebook, write on Google+, read on Google Reader, and much, much more. It's intelligent all right, if a bit buggy.
My-Cast Weather Radar
$4.99
If you don't think a weather app could possibly be worth $4.99, think again. Garmin's My-Cast Weather Radar lets you not only view weather forecasts through pinch-zoom interactive graphs, but also track storms in real-time, monitor cloud activity, and check detailed weather info anywhere in the world. 
Rhapsody
Free, requires subscription from $4.99 per month
As far as cloud music players on the Nook Tablet go, it's either Pandora (which is preloaded), Grooveshark, Mog, or Rhapsody. I've always preferred Rhapsody (an Editors' Choice in the Android app field) because it offers the most fuss-free on-demand music streaming, and perhaps the biggest collection of music--more than 8 million songs.
Seesmic
Free
Seesmic is a popular social media aggregator that loads timelines from your various social networking accounts, like Twitter, Facebook , and Salesforce Chatter. Very useful app to install on the Nook, since the store doesn't offer any full-featured social networking apps from the sites themselves. 
Skitch
Free
By the makers of Evernote, Skitch lets you scribble all over photos or pages of text, or edit the image in a palette that includes tools for resizing, cropping, shapes, etc. Finally, you can import your sketch into Evernote.
Smithsonian Channel
Free
If you're a nerd and love your museums and documentaries, definitely download this video streaming app. You'll find hi-res videos and full-length features covering everything from how to cook the best chili to how some civilizations died.
StorySpark
Free
StorySpark is aimed at kids, but will appeal to adults with big imaginations, too! This gorgeous app lets you build your own children's ebook, which you can then submit to app developer Tikatok (Barnes & Noble's self-publishing company) to publish online or share with friends. For an additional fee, you can turn it into a professionally bound soft or hardcover.
UStream
Free
The Nook Tablet doesn't have a camera for you to record and upload your own videos, but you can stream other people's live footage to your heart's content with the UStream.TV app. We've spent a lot of time with this on the desktop client and iPhone app and found both extremely user-friendly.
Word Rainbow
$0.99
World Rainbow is a fun word game that's as addictive as Scramble and brainy as a crossword puzzle. Word Rainbow tests your ability to find hidden words in a jumble of letters; you're guided by trivia questions and word definitions.
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