Not that Barnes and Noble plans to take on the iPad or anything like that, but this week, leaked documents sure made it look like they will take on the Amazon Kindle Fire. The documents show a Barnes and Noble tablet with double the memory and storage than the Kindle Fire. The documents, which were obtained by Engadget.com, showed slides with the title that reads, “Kindle Fire vs. Nook Tablet, Better Reader, Better Tablet, Better than Kindle Fire.”
The Nook Tablet will sell for a low $249, which is the same price the Nook Color hit the shelves at. In the meantime, Barnes and Noble will be lowering the price of the Nook Color to $199. Since the Nook Color was introduced almost one year ago, it has been second in shipments to the iPad and iPad 2 for the 2nd quarter of 2011. The Nook Tablet will be a little faster than both the Nook Color and Kindle Fire with a processor clocked at 1.2Ghz compared to 1.0 Ghz. Most of the other features are very similar to the Nook Color and the Kindle Fire including the 1024×600 resolution touch screen display. The Nook Tablet will have 16GB of internal storage and 1GB of RAM compared to 8GB and 512MB, respectively.
The Nook Tablet will be a little lighter compared to the other two tablets, but the real issue is whether or not Barnes and Noble will have enough content for it. Experts say that in addition to lowering the price of the Nook Color, Barnes and Noble could release a low-end black and white version for less than $100. Some are saying that a new version of the Nook Color could see a quad-core processor from Nvidia which would give it more speed and browsing power than other e-readers or tablets on the market. Others say that getting the full potential from a quad-core processor would mean the device would have to be running Android 4.0, or the Ice Cream Sandwich update.
Experts also wanted to discount the effect that the Nook Tablet would have on Apple and the iPad 2. The iPad and iPad 2 are taking up about 70 percent of the market right now, even at a low price of $499. Because other tablets are coming out for almost $200 less, we could see the price of the iPad drop as well.
