First Look at the B&N NOOK Glowlight 4 Ocean Teal

The Barnes and Noble NOOK Glowlight 4 has been on the market for over 4 years, and they have had color variants in the past to drive sales. This included the seminal Pearl Pink model, which sold like hotcakes and was gone in a couple of months. The bookseller is hoping to strike fire again with the advent of their Ocean Teal variant, which has only been available for a couple of months. Barnes and Noble has confirmed it has several new e-readers coming out in 2026, so I don’t know if a fresh paint job on their oldest e-reader is worth it. This device is only relevant in the United States, since it is sold in bookstores and online there. You need a USA credit card and a billing address to buy e-books and other digital content. The Barnes & Noble Nook Glowlight 4 Ocean Teal features a 6-inch E INK Carta HD display with a resolution of 1072×1404 and 300 PPI. The screen is not flush with the bezel; instead, it has a sunken appearance. A new screen protector has been installed at the factory level to help protect the plastic e-paper display. This was a good move by B&N because it absorbs light rather than reflecting it, as glass-based screens do. There is a series of white and amber LED lights that allow you to control the front-lit display and color temperature. This will be customized with a two-slider bar in the settings menu. The front-lit display can only be tuned to automatically turn on at a specific time of day. It does not have an ambient light sensor; instead, it relies on the time of day. There are physical page-turn buttons on both sides of the screen that curl inwards toward the back. At the bottom of the unit is the Home button, denoted by the N. If you press it, you will return to the home screen. If you hold it for a couple of seconds, the front-lit display will turn on. Under the hood is an Allwinner B300 quad-core CPU running at 1.5 GHz, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of internal storage. You can charge the reader with a USB-C cable. It features Bluetooth 5.1 and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n to connect to the NOOK Bookstore, allowing you to purchase and download ebooks. It is powered by a 1,400 mAh battery, which should be good for three weeks of light reading. Michael Kozlowski has written about audiobooks, e-books and e-readers for the past eighteen years. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Preview: ~427 words