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B&N Nook Tablet vs. Amazon Kindle Fire
DeviceGuru writes with this excerpt: "Barnes & Noble is expected to announce a 7-inch color tablet on November 7th, positioning it head-to-head with Amazon's recently announced Kindle Fire. B&N's Nook Tablet is rumored to have a slightly faster processor, twice the RAM and flash, and a $50 price premium relative to Amazon's tablet, among other differences. The quick-reference table in this article compares key features and specs of the two 7-inch Android tablets, based on a combination of leaked data published at Engadget.com plus some additional data from B&N's existing Nook Color specs, which seems to have much in common with this new, higher-end Nook model."
I've been following the announcements of the Kindle Fire and I'm sort of wondering if Amazon is abandoning what was so good about the platform, namely electronic ink. One has always been able to read a book off the LCD screen of one's smartphone or notebook, but the Kindle was a pleasurable experience because e-ink really is easier on the eyes. If the Kindle is going LCD, then it's just like any other tablet out there.
I I'm sort of wondering if Amazon is abandoning what was so good about the platform, namely electronic ink.
Five E-Ink Kindles vs one video-capable tablet doesn't quite add up to abandonment.
if they had stopped selling and coming up with new models of them, then sure, you would have a point.
but there's plenty of stuff the eink displays suck for.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Why the fuck are e-books so expensive? Many of them are just slightly less than the actual book! Why the hell am I going to spend almost as much money buying the e-book, but not actually get anything physical out of the deal?
It was one thing when it came to buying digital music. You could spend $1 to get the song that you wanted, rather than paying $25 to get a CD with the song that you wanted. That's a big enough price difference to make it worthwhile. But with e-books, it's just stupid to spend $15 on a e-book, while the actual book is only $17.
There's no excuse for e-book prices to be that high. While authors and editors do deserve to get paid, e-books reduce the manufacturing and distribution costs to almost nothing. I just don't buy that the $2 more spent on a real book will cover the costs of harvesting of the trees used to make the paper, the manufacturing of the paper itself, the shipping of the massive paper rolls to the publisher, the cost and setup of the publishing equipment, the ink used to print the book, the typesetting, the creation of the cover art, the printing of the cover (especially for hardcover books), the cutting of the paper, the binding of the book, the packing of the finished books, the shipping to the publisher's and/or distributor's warehouses, the storage costs at these warehouses, the shipping to the individual bookstores, and the salaries of the many people involved with all of this.
I will not buy an e-book as long as it's clear that I'm getting blatantly ripped off.
The amazon tablet, as opposed to the amazon readers, is just another tablet. What is special about it and why it will win is Silk backed by the Amazon cloud. Now you have awesome power in a cheap tablet. B&N is trying to compete on specs at the low end and there's almost no amount of minot spec improvement that will rival the added power of the cloud. Amazons silk web pages will almost always open faster. Amazon can add a Siri like personal assistant. B&N can't add those things. some third party might do it for them but it won't be as integrated.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'm not interested in owning a Nook unless it uses proprietary file formats and locks me into getting ALL my content from Barnes & Noble.
I wonder what the difference between the "new" one and my existing Nook Color running CyanogenMod?
Perhaps what you are hoping for just isn't possible with eink?
I'm sure if amazon could use eink for colour and *responsive* web browsing they would have done so. The fact that they have moved to LCD in order to cater to the people who do want exactly what you say you want should tell you something about the capabilities of the different screen techs and whether they see eink as ever doing well for web browsing and colour or interactive media.
Also, the addition of a touch screen to the normal kindle definitely is not a small step- it's a huge change in the way you interact with the device. If it weren't for the fire everyone would be more interested in it. If the fire does well I imagine they'll move all their eink readers to android too (hence the new touchscreen) so there's no point them developing lots of apps for an older kindle platform at this point. The kindle as a separate software platform from android will probably die off at some point, so really the fire is closer to future kindles than the kindle.
Amazon is hardly abandoning e-ink, because you can still buy a Kindle with e-ink -- at lower prices than ever if you can accept their screensaver advertisement scheme.
As far as whether LCD or e-ink is better, I happen to have both a Kindle and a rooted Nook Color with the Kindle Reader software installed. So I always have a choice when I want to read a Kindle book of reading it on e-ink or LCD. There are some situations where e-ink wins hands down (reading in bright ambient light), others were LCD wins (photos; diagrams of almost any kind; reading in darkened rooms or in bed), and others where it is the touchscreen that makes the difference (highlighting text and entering notes).
So given a free choice of reading a book on a e-ink Kindle or an LCD tablet, most of the time I choose the LCD. With a larger, higher resolution touchscreen e-ink display, it might be about even. There's no question that e-ink in bright ambient light is the best for reading text, but I find the UI on the second generation Kindle irritating even after owning it for a couple of years. The semantics of "back" seems to be a bugbear in many UI designs; touchscreen reader UIs tend to use screen gestures to flip pages and buttons to back out of books. I find this works well, so the Kindle Touch probably brings the Kindle up to parity with reading a Kindle book on an Android tablet in the UI department.
Reading a Kindle book on my wife's iPad is even better, because the iPad's rendering is better -- at least if you read books with lots of math in them like I do. The Kindle mangles equations and makes tables a pain in the neck to read. The iPad reader also allows you to zoom in to photos, which as yet neither the nook reader nor the Amazon reader software for Android allow. Sometimes I keep an iPod touch handy when reading on the Nook or Kindle in case the formatting is messed up or I need to get a good look at a photograph or diagram.
As much as I hate to say this, it seems the bet choice in terms of convenience and user experience is using Amazon and Barnes and Noble's reader software on an Apple device.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
How rootable is the Kindle Fire? It's trivially easy with the Nook Color; that's why I bought one.
The "better PDF support" line has been mentioned a bunch, but I can't tell what it means.
I've had a Kindle since v2, and have the graphite one with the keyboard now. I don't read many PDF's, but on the rare occasion I need to, it seems to do the job. I could see a larger screen helping. Other than that, what needs to be better about it?
Amazon doesn't create the eInk displays, so if a color eInk display isn't available, how will they make a color eInk Kindle? The Fire is just another device, likely for Amazon to sell and sell subscriptions to streaming/downloadable media, in addition to ebooks.
And touch isn't a gimmick. Double tapping a word to get the definition or selecting a paragraph for highlighting beats the pants off of doing the same with a d-pad.