- A Quick Update on the Tablet Wars
- Evaluating Apples iPad
- Evaluating Amazons Kindle Fire
- Evaluating Barnes & Nobles NOOK Tablet
- Other Tablets
- Which Tablet is Right for You?
Evaluating Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Tablet
Not one to stand by while its biggest competitor dives into the tablet market, book retailer Barnes & Noble has introduced its own tablet computer. The B&N NOOK Tablet looks and functions suspiciously similar to Amazon’s Kindle Fire, but at a slightly higher price.
Similarities first. The NOOK Tablet is roughly the same size as the Kindle Fire, if not a tad lighter. It uses the same 7” LCD screen, runs a similar version of the Android operating system, offers a built-in web browser, and has Wi-Fi connectivity. And, like the Fire, the NOOK Tablet is tied into a single retailer ecosystem – in this case, Barnes & Noble’s system of 2 million books and magazines, plus music and movies. (The NOOK Tablet also offers access to movies and music from Netflix, Hulu Plus, Pandora, and other services.)
Figure 3 Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Tablet.
Now, the differences – which are slight. The NOOK Tablet offers twice as much RAM (1GB vs. 512MB) and internal storage as the Fire (16GB vs. 8GB), plus the ability to double that storage via microSD card. Then there’s the price -- $249 vs. the Fire at $199.
So you pay fifty bucks more for more internal storage, plus B&N’s ecosystem (plus Hulu, Netflix, et al) vs. Amazon’s ecosystem. That’s about it, really.