NEW YORK — A year after the release of the Nook Color, Barnes & Noble returns to a market suddenly crowded with "reader's tablets," including the red-hot Kindle Fire from its top competitor. B&N is firing right back at Amazon with a high-powered new multimedia Nook Tablet and competitive price cuts to the current Nook Color and Nook Simple Touch e-reader.
"Nook Tablet is our lightest fastest, media tablet," said Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch. Lynch presented the $249, 7-inch Nook Tablet at a press event Monday morning. It will be available on Nov. 18, just in the nick of time for holiday shopping, with preorders beginning Nov. 7.
On the outside, the new Nook Tablet doesn't look radically different from the current Nook Color. Internally, though, its guts more closely resemble that of an iPad 2On the outside, the new Nook Tablet doesn't look radically different from the current Nook Color. Internally, though, its guts more closely resemble an iPad 2's. With a 1.0 GHz processor, 16 GB of storage and a full 1 GB of RAM, the Nook Tablet packs twice as much memory and storage as the Nook Color, Kobo Vox or Kindle Fire. In fact, that's the same storage, twice as much memory and a faster-clocked processor than the $499 iPad.
The new tablet needs serious internal hardware because it's serious about video, supporting streaming apps from Netflix and Hulu Plus, plus sideloaded video content. Nook Color could easily handle web video, but processor- and memory-intensive HD content will benefit from the beefed-up specs.
"With almost double the RAM, Nook Tablet owners will have no problem zipping back and forth between multiple apps," Lynch said.
Barnes & Noble is also promising that the tablet will deliver up to nine hours of battery life of video playback, and 11.5 hours of reading time. This is a lot of power from a lightweight, one-hand device handling resource-intensive content.
Continue reading 'Nook Fires Back: Tablet & E-Reader Family Aims At Amazon and More' ...
The Nook Color takes its still-competitive specs down to the more competitive price point of $199, while the Nook Simple Touch E Ink reader drops from $139 to $99 — the same price as the comparable Kindle Touch, but with no ads. (And no option for buying books over 3G, for what it's worth.) The Nook Simple Touch is also getting a firmware upgrade that promises sharper text, faster page turns and better responsiveness.
With the Nook Color, Barnes & Noble hit on the first winning tablet strategy not patterned after the iPad. With firmware updates, B&N steadily improved the capability of the device, adding Flash, games, and Android apps. Now, though, media heavyweight Amazon is looking to follow the same strategy to blow Barnes & Noble out of the water.
Just like Amazon, Barnes & Noble can afford slim margins on hardware because its devices support sales of books, magazines and other media from its online store. For both tablets, Google's open-source Android operating system does the heavy lifting and provides a base of applications, while the custom build provides a tailored experience and ecosystem. And just like Amazon's Kindles, the more Nook devices and accounts in the world, the more competitive the entire ecosystem of electronic media and apps becomes.
Unlike Amazon or Apple, though, Barnes & Noble doesn't have the same depth of media beyond reading material. The company sells CDs and DVDs, but not tablet-native music or movies. It's dependent on Netflix and Hulu for streaming video, or users to rip their own.
Crucially, B&N also doesn't have Amazon or Apple's infrastructure in the cloud to support remote storage and syncing of that content. The Kindle Fire may only have 8 GB of storage with no SD expansion, but Amazon may be able to get away with that limitation because of Cloud Drive's ability to easily swap extra content in and out. Barnes & Noble needs those extra GB a little bit more than Apple or Amazon.
Barnes & Noble's stance, voiced by Lynch at the press conference, is that there are still too many questions the cloud's stability and security to rely on it extensively for storage or rerouting web traffic.
"People don't always want to be connected to wi-fi to get their content," Lynch said. Barnes & Noble's stores also offer it an advantage over Amazon (if not Apple) because of their ability to offer in-store support — key for the casual user market that Barnes & Noble is targeting.
The markets for Apple, Amazon and B&N can coexist up to a point because they appeal to different segments. Barnes & Noble has to maintain its close connection with its customers while still offering additional features to maintain broad parity.
But you have to say they're underdogs to win a high-tech shooting war. Better tech specs will only help Barnes & Noble fight off Amazon for so long. Ultimately, they have to make the bet that its rich local approach, from stores to storage, will resonate with customers better than Amazon's blitzkrieg from the cloud.
