Nook E-Reader Gone Tablet
posted Sunday Nov 6, 2011 by Jon Wurm
It looks like Barnes & Noble didn't want to take the chance of getting burned by the Amazon Kindle Fire this holiday season. Some internal documents surfaced that revealed a November 15th release date for the their new Nook Tablet device. From the image it is nearly impossible to tell the Nook Color apart from it's younger brother but according to Barnes & Noble, the differences are mainly on the inside.
- 8.1- x 5- x 0.48-inches
- 7" color VividView IPS with 1024x600 resolution
- 16GB of flash storage
- 1G of RAM
- SD card slot
- 802.11b/g/n WiFi
- 1.2GHz dual-core OMAP4 processor
Hit the break to see if you can tell the Nook Tablet and Nook Color apart and to find out how much you can expect to drop for this device come November 15th.
What Barnes & Noble plans to accomplish with this device can be summed up in an exerpt from their internal documents,
everything the Nook Color (does) + the best in HD entertainment
For $249 at launch date or for pre-order starting November 7th, the Nook Tablet has enough firepower to be useful for your e-book and general purpose media needs but let's hope they were at least smart enough to include a sound card that offers a line out, unlike what I have heard in regards to the Kindle Fire. Nook Color fans can expect a price drop to $199 by November 15th and some new content like Hulu Plus, so there's no need to feel overshadowed.
I'm not sure if the Nook Tablet will be as widely accepted as they hoped after asking the myself the question, "are the hardware upgrades really what consumers who are inclined to use these devices want?". Having messed around with the Nook Color I can think of some user interface tweaks that would make the experience more fluid and judging from the image, it doesn't look like they've touched any of that. We'll see.
