B&N Launches Nook Tablet, Drops Regular Nook to $99
Barnes & Noble has officially announced its Nook Tablet, a device we first heard about on Friday afternoon.
Late last week, we heard rumors that Barnes & Noble was planning to announce a rival to the Kindle Fire this week. Those rumors also contained talk of a Nook Color price drop to make room for the Nook Tablet's $249 price tag. With the latter happening last night, B&N this morning rounded things out with confirmation of the Nook Tablet's existence.
In addition to being an ereader, Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablet offers users access to popular movies, TV shows, music and more via services like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Pandora and others, as well as Web browsing, email and a whole host of other applications. As we heard last week, the device packs a 7-inch IPS display, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage space (expandable to 32GB via microSD). However, the battery life seems to have improved significantly since the marketing materials we spied last week were created; B&N says this new Nook Tablet has an 11.5-hour battery life, while last week's leaked documents put the battery time at four hours with Wi-Fi on or eight hours with WiFi switched off.
Again, as we heard last week, the price is confirmed at $249. This has seen the Nook Color drop down to $199 and, perhaps most interestingly, the Nook Simple Touch drop to $99. This brings the Nook Simple Touch into direct competition with Amazon's $79 ad-supported Kindle. The Nook Tablet is now available for preorder and is expected to ship (and to hit stores) late next week.
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This should be nice. I'm been using the MIUI ROM on my Nook Color for several months and it has been great. The dual core CPU and extra RAM will be a great addition.
This pleases me greatly because I was considering getting a nook simple touch for my ma for xmas. At 99$ it's pretty much a no brainer at this point.
Got bezel? I still think that tablets are just a fad like 3D TVs, netbooks, etc. Not to say that they are useless, but they aren't a must-have gadget that will revolutionize computing.
Netflix and Hulu Plus on the Nook Tablet is a major boon for BN considering Amazon is looking like they will only support their own media services on the Fire.
Considering I already have Hulu Plus and Netflix, I'd pick the Nook Tablet over the Fire.
Awesome. The Simple looks like a decent deal now. Gotta love the E-Ink.
Got bezel? I still think that tablets are just a fad like 3D TVs, netbooks, etc. Not to say that they are useless, but they aren't a must-have gadget that will revolutionize computing.
The vast majority of consumers don't want or need a desktop environment, since their only real task with them is content consumption. This is what a tablet excels at. Combine this with increased cloud storage/computing and we will see an even greater decline in desktop sales leaving only laptops in tech-savvy households as the only true computer(s).
** and powerful gaming rigs for gamers, of course.
Looks like a good little tablet. Something I'll actually be looking into.
match that pricewise, apple istuff!