Nook Tablet leaked; Kindle Fire on steroids
Barnes & Noble has been in the budget tablet market ever since the Nook Color was released and hacked to work as much more than just an ereader. With the upcoming Kindle Fire, that position in the market was threatened, and Barnes & Noble is apparently not about to let that happen. Leaked documents tell the tale of an updated Nook Color called the Nook Tablet. The screen is the same, but the processor is up to 1.2GHz and the RAM is up to 1GB. That’s twice the RAM and a significant CPU upgrade compared to the Fire. Unlike Amazon who is selling the Fire at a loss, Barnes & Noble knows from the Nook Color that people will have these budget tablets running hacked ROMs in no time and is pricing the Nook Tablet $50 higher at $249. That extra money is definitely going to be worth it, as the extra RAM and CPU power is going to make it much easier to run custom Honeycomb/Ice Cream Sandwich builds on it.
Storage wise the Nook Tablet also has an advantage: 16GB internally, and an SD card slot to boot. The only way the Nook Tablet seems to be inferior is battery life, where the Kindle Fire promises roughly 8 hours no matter what you do while the Nook Tablet requires you to run without wireless and such to hit that, and only get half with video.
The Nook Tablet will be announced on November 7th, put on demo in stores on November 15th, and shipped to customers on November 16th. As with the Fire, this is a US–only device, but if you can get your hands on one the Nook Tablet will be a much better companion for international users simply because the beefed up hardware puts it much closer to something like the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus if you just get some proper Android version on there.
Check out the full set of leaked documents at Engadget.
[Engadget]
