Barnes & Noble isn’t letting Amazon’s foray into the tablet business go unanswered. On Monday, B&N unveiled its newest Nook e-reader device, the $249 Nook Tablet, a full-color, 16 GB, 8.1-inch device running a heavily modified version of Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
The Nook Tablet also comes preloaded with Hulu, Netflix and Barnes & Noble’s online store. It is available for preorder now on Barnes & Noble’s website and in physical stores. The company says it will be “in stores and in homes on or about November 17.”
“In NOOK Tablet, we’ve created the best wireless media tablet in the portable 7-inch class,” said Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch in a prepared statement on Monday.
Tech bloggers have been decidedly more reserved in their initial assessments, praising the device’s distinct look and lightness, but reserving their final judgement until they can test both the Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire side-by-side.
The new device was announced by Lynch at a New York press event, along with new, lower prices for the Nook Simple Touch (down from $139 to $99) and the Nook Color (down from $249 to $199), the latter of which Lynch said has sold “millions” since its debut and ranks just behind the iPad in terms of tablet, a claim supported by research firm IDC’s report that the Nook Color overtook the Amazon Kindle in first quarter 2011 sales.
At $99 and the Nook Simple Touch is clearly designed to compete head-to-head with Amazon’s $99 Kindle Touch. But the Nook Simple Touch, like all of Barnes & Noble’s Nooks, comes with no built-in advertisements. An ad-free experience on the Amazon Kindle Touch will cost an extra $40, while some customers have complained that the ad-supported version can lead to erroneous “butt-dialed” purchases when a customer accidentally brushes the device’s button while an ad is running.
Also, Lynch couldn’t resist openly jabbing at rival Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, unveiled September 28, pointing out that the Nook Tablet has twice the onboard storage space.
“The Kindle Fire is deficient as a media tablet,” Lynch said, according to SlashGear. “6GB is simply not enough for a media tablet.”
Indeed, while the devices are strikingly similar in many respects from a technical standpoint - same screen size, same screen resolution, about the same weight - there’s little denying that the Barnes & Noble has attempted to beat Amazon when it comes to memory, with 1 GB of RAM on the Nook Tablet compared to the Kindle Fire’s 512MB. The Nook Tablet also gives users the option to expand the device’s storage via MicroSD card, which the Kindle Fire lacks.
That said, the device is $50 more than the Kindle Fire’s bargain-bin price of $199, and also lacks some important features unique to the Fire, including Amazon’s supposedly speedy cloud-based web browser, Silk, and its cloud-based file and music storage systems, though Barnes & Noble says that all electronic content stored on the Nook Tablet will also be backed up on its Nook Cloud service.
Neither the Nook Tablet nor the Kindle Fire has a camera like the iPad 2. And both devices are seeking to use heavily-modified versions of Google’s Android tablet operating system to push their own catalogs of e-books and digital music, movies and other media (e.g. comic books) to users. The debate continues over which e-book catalog is better.
There is a certain irony to the fact that both Amazon and Barnes & Noble are essentially now competing for the title of best-selling Android device in the United States, although both have radically overhauled the Android operating system to suit their particular purposes.
Still, it was clear from Monday’s announcement that Barnes & Noble is taking some cues from Apple when it comes to leveraging another asset is has against Amazon: Its brick-and-mortar physical retail outlets, where customers can come and use free WiFi and have their Nooks serviced for free.
“It’s the same kind of experience as Apple,” Leonard Riggio, chairman of Barnes & Noble, told the New York Times, “It makes the product and category much more important.”
But Barnes & Noble is going to have to push the Nook Tablet hard to catch up with Amazon, which was already reportedly on track to beat the iPad in terms of pre-orders, due to a leaked image of Amazon’s sales inventory.
And neither device has an immediate chance of dethroning the iPad in terms of total global sales numbers, as Apple is expected to easily win the holiday season with 73 percent of the market in 2011, according to a recent report from market research firm Gartner, though neither the Nook Tablet nor the Kindle Fire will be available outside of the U.S. until next year at the earliest.
Carl Franzen
Carl Franzen is TPM Idea Lab's tech reporter. He used to work for The Daily, AOL and The Atlantic Wire (though not simultaneously, thankfully). He's never met a button that didn't need to be pressed. He can be reached at carl@talkingpointsmemo.com.
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