Slashdot Mirror
B&N Releases Nook Tablet To Rival Amazon Fire
jfruhlinger writes "It looks like there's competition in the low-cost media tablet space — and that Barnes & Noble is determined not to go the way of Borders. Barnes & Noble today announced the Nook Tablet, an Android-based tablet with better specs than the Kindle Fire (though it's also $50 pricier). The Nook Tablet will allow Hulu and Netflix streaming and sideloading of content, but won't have access to the general-purpose Android App Store."
It will be able to access the Amazon App Store
I have a nook color, with CM7. I have the google market, amazon market, both nook and kindle app and netflix. I am sure if I cared I could have hulu premium as well.
It wouldn't be too shocking if they opted to bundle a different browser that uses the same technology. Silk isn't the first to operate that way.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
There's just one question:
Will it root?
The old nook has a smooth browsing experience. I don't see how Silk is going to help unless you have a hopelessly pathetic Internet connection.
... the already-exisitng, easily-hackable previous Nook Color is now $50 less--just US$199. Nice! Very tempted...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
It should be noted that Apple is publicly happy about the Amazon Fire and its rivals because it further contributes to Android fragmentation.
If you can turn on "Unknown sources" and install APKs, you can probably install the APKs for Amazon, Soc.io, and SlideMe. I have no citation for certain, but it's far more likely than not.
And unlike the Kindle Fire, the Nook Color has an SD card slot.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Without access to the Android app store, it's not much different than the higher end Chinese clones.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
With CM7 it makes a really great tablet. I use mine all the time. You can install the Nook app, so you really lose nothing at all. Netflix works great on it.
From TFA:
> [the kindle fire]'s 8G bytes of storage is not enough to hold media for those situations where the user is not connected to the Internet. "You're not always going to be connected to the cloud," he said.
All together now: Bingo!
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
e-ink is usefull for an e-reader but less so for a tablet. e-ink is too slow to respond (even b&w) to be usefull for 99% of tablet applications.
Until e-ink's response time improves it will only really be usefull for eReading and a few other tasks.
I wouldn't want to read eBooks on a non e-ink device. I wouldn't want a table on e-ink though.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I didn't like the stock reader, nor the Nook app. I guess if I bought my books from BN, it would still be nice, but since most of my stuff comes from places like Project Gutenberg, Baen, etc... I found that I like FBReader much better (need a separate reader for PDFs though, but the stock/Nook app sucks for those, too)
... is that using the touch screen is difficult at the very edge of the screen. This is really only a problem with some applications that put buttons in the corners, like Tweetcaster. Also, the Nook reader is very hard to use unless you pump up the dpi to make the graphical elements larger.
But that kind of stuff is pretty trivial.
Also, a dual-core 7" tablet for $200 is pretty sweet, especially if it's as hackable as the original.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
What does Silk buy you? Both the Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire have only WiFi connectivity, not 3G, so it isn't compensating for low-speed connection. Both have dual core 1 GHz processors, and if you can't render a webpage quickly with that, then something is seriously wrong. The original Nook Color with a single core 800 MHz could handle browsing just fine, although flash was somewhat slow.
So the only thing you gain by delegating some processing to a third party is battery life, but the Nook Tablet already has a longer battery life estimate than the Kindle Fire anyway. So what's the advantage?
What?
You can add a near-instant capacitive touch interface to a color (only 30FPS/30Hz, but that still seems ok) E-Ink display just fine, though it darkens the screen a bit.
A darn shame the tech hasn't been mass-produced though. No demand for it despite the clear battery life improvement.
Not quite - if you install the standard Nook app, you lose "More in Store" and "Read in Store" - I assume the stock Color had these. (My eInk Nook does.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I still prefer kobo and wait eagerly for the next release.
I'm running CM 7.1 on it and am very happy with it. I have it overclocked to 1.2Ghz and I can run both the Nook and Kindle Android apps on it. I've been playing a lot of Madden 12 on it though and I need to set the graphics to medium or low though for decent performance. I think that B&N will do well if they have most of the popular apps available for it with the speed bump and dual core processor. Having the Hulu and Netflix apps is huge and the ability to have 48 gigs of storage is nice. I rip my DVDs using Handbrake and they run just playback just fine on the screen. I prefer the 7" screen to the 10 inch screen on the iPad and most tablets.
Which color eInk display are you talking about, exactly? As far as I'm aware, there aren't any commercially available right now.
Not only that, you can install CM7 to boot directly off the SD card, so if you wanted to go back to the stock firmware it is just a simple matter of booting without the SD installed. If you go this route, make sure to use a Sandisk SD card though (even the class 2 Sandisk is faster than the class 10 of most other brands for this use case, since the other cards are only fast at very large block transfers).
Holy shit, choice! Competition!
I never thought I'd see the day when people would whimper and cry because of it.
At the very least, the new tablet will help that.
But honestly, I think the thing they need the most is to open up it's software. Access to the Android App Market would help. But I think the best idea would be to sell it with a Linux OS, and a web browser (firefox/chrome/ whatever) that includes an app for Barnes & Nobles store.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Yay, a slight revision of the Nook Color... meh. Won't someone just release a color E-ink tablet already.
Now, the Android tablets, as much as people might talk about their abilities, do not have a source of free content. They have a source of integration through Google, but most other tablets do as well. There may be a source of exclusive free content, but who is going to do it? Google has not done so thus far. BN could do it. They could give away tracks and video and books like Apple and Android does, but will they make enough money to cover the free content? As it is we see that Hulu and Netflix is the big thing, but Hulu cost $120 a year for mobile devices, versus $80 for Amazon Prime. Netflix also costs $120 a year, and the availability of any given video on a mobile device is always in flux as the licensing changes.
BN has the power to put content and integration behind an Android tablet and make them competative.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
B&N is coming to the "media" tablet party a bit late. They should have found a way to trim $50 off the tablet to directly compete with the Fire. By not doing so, they won't be converting too many of the faithful kindle crowd.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
On top of that, the Nook Color is programmed to try to boot off the microSD card first. So "hacking" it is just writing a CM7 boot image to a microSD card, putting it in, and restarting the tablet. If you ever want to go back to the original Nook Color experience, just reboot it without the card.
Any word on if the new Nook Tablet has the same feature?
Won't this tablet also be just a terminal for all content served by the BN servers, even if they pass through other content, as Amazon's Kindle Fire is? So all content is mediated by BN.
That's like buying a TV from CBS, to which CBS can send whatever "necessary" modifications to content from other TV networks. Yeah, it's like getting a cellphone locked into a single mobile carrier through which all calls are funneled. But look at how that's working out with cablemodems when the company is Comcast (and plenty of others): competing services, like downloaded movies or VOIP, get substandard service or worse. And any company can go the Comcast route any day it chooses.
--
make install -not war
$50 in this price range is a huge difference. Think video cards for comparison. These are really 2 different products at 2 different price points. We'll see what buyers want.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
They're talking about the display's response time, not the touch sensing. Is there a color e-ink that can display 30FPS?
--
make install -not war
I bought a Nook Color last Christmas and have been pretty disappointed. The eBook prices are ridiculously high. They are often higher than the physical book in the store or Amazon. They also seem to be consistently higher than Amazon's prices for the same eBook (which are also too high). The reader's behavior doesn't really seem to match up to the specs. It feels pretty slow, and the screen response is extremely poor. Many of the applications that come with (such as crosswords) are not functional because the touchscreen response is inaccurate. Battery life is pretty good when you're using it, but if it's set aside for a couple of weeks and not used, the battery will drain in the meantime.
Unlike the Nook Color, the Kindle Fire is part of a successful ecosystem. ;) In all seriousness, I wonder how much Amazon Prime and the rest of the ecosystem, such as book lending, will impact this.
If the Kindle Fire turns out to be a Fire Hose, then there's no comparison.
I8-D
Forgive my squirrely ignorance, but wouldn't that defeat the purpose of e-ink? I thought its big deal was that it only refreshed as needed, thus leading to massive reductions in battery usage.
I've been pretty happy with the Nook Color. I mostly use it with free or sideloaded ebooks. Paid ebooks are way too expensive considering there's no dead wood, shipping or many other costs as regular books have. I went with the Color over an e-ink reader so that I can use it for light email/web usage while on the road. I dual-boot Honeycomb from a microSD card for apps not available through B&N's limited app store (which is most of them). If The Nook Tablet is as easy to dual-boot as the NC, I might consider upgrading in a few months.
Android screens are rendered widget by widget, pixel by pixel for every screen modification (scroll, zoom, item state changed, etc.) and that means a lot of work is being done for every frame. This is a legacy of the original spec not requiring a dedicated gpu. Modern devices are getting them but the acceleration is sort of hacked into that gpuless model. iOS on the other hand didn't start with such a limiting assumption and paints everything to an open gl surface with a fixed camera. Most screen modifications like scroll and zoom are just basic gl transformations that don't require a re-rendering event. That's why it looks so smooth.
In Republican America phones tap you.
No, not much difference at all -- except for rendering and a few new things, slashdot is pretty much what it was ten years ago. Look in the archives, you'll see news about new Linux distros, new MS OSes, new hardware (especially CPUs).
If you want to see different stories, submit them. If you don't want to see certain stories, vote them down in the firehose.
Free Martian Whores!
The ability to rapidly change content vs. the *need* to actively require power to maintain screen contents are two distinct points. In practice, those two points are in conflict with today's tech. eInk has steady-state properties that allow the display to be 'off' and still readable, but changing the state takes effort and incurs a large time penalty. If eInk had the steady-state property *and* could change between any possible states in under a millisecond, that would still have the battery-saving properties and be responsive.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The Nook Color can be found for $149 Pre-Owned and $79 for Nook B&W Simple Touch @ Barnes and Noble. At those prices I had to buy both. Color: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/p/cert-pre-owned-nook-color-barnes-noble/1100666155 B&W: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/p/cpo-nook-simple-touch-barnes-noble/1102471846
Meh, tell that to my old iphone. It took 20-30 seconds to display text after I typed it. You can imagine what scrolling around webpages felt like. The thing was painful. :(
Meh, tell that to my old iphone. It took 20-30 seconds to display text after I typed it. You can imagine what scrolling around webpages felt like. The thing was painful. :(
iPhone 3G on iOS 4.0? Been there and it was painful. I missed calls because of the crappy performance. Web pages would take 3 forevers to load... Still, once they did, they scrolled flawlessly in the "you're moving a page with your finger" sense. No choppy animation or pixel by pixel jumping of the page contents. Score one for using the device's GPU to do your UI rendering, huh?
Uh, yes. There's one demo showing one playing Transformers (the movie) and the reported battery life is astonishing. But there's little demand for it, apparently.
Hence why my response centered around the actual touch response, because I thought the above was relatively known.
There was a report on a tech blog about a company finally manufacturing the devices for commercial sale in Europe, but that was a few months ago. I'll see if I can source it when I get home.
Exactly right.
I can't figure out if it was oversight or intentional, but that thing was unusable. Oddly I had problems moving the pages too, iirc. Maybe I'm remembering it worse than it was... but it was definitely a bad experience.
One of this big draws of the Kindle Fire is that has Amazon Silk built in.
Personally, I'd go a long way to avoid a browser like Amazon Silk and the privacy issues it raises. And quite seriously, if you have trouble loading web pages fast enough over wifi on a dual-core 1Ghz+ processor, then there's something wrong with the way the browser was programmed. Silk sounds like a solution in search of a problem to me.
Now if I write a tablet app I need to host it through the Google, Amazon and B&N marketplaces. Though right now I think I would skip B&N as their claim of "over a thousand apps" is not that impressive.
Er, what? Having "over a thousand apps" for the Nook might be a valid reason to skip _buying_ the Nook. (Realistically of course it depends on what those thousand+ apps are, what you plan to do with it, and if you're willing to go through the fairly painless process of creating a boot SD card so you can access Google's marketplace.)
However i can't think of any reason why that would discourage you from hosting your app through B&N. As far as i'm aware putting an app up on different markets doesn't require significant rewriting or anything. And if you put it up on the Google marketplace you're competing with 500,000 or so other apps, whereas on the B&N store you're only competing with "over 1000" other apps. If i had an app i would jump at the chance to get it on the B&N store, especially if you believe their claims that the original Nook Color is second in sales only to the iPad.
Reduced competition, not so good for the buyers but great for the sellers.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
IMO: If you want eInk, get an eReader, otherwise get a real Android tablet, instead of trying to convert an LED eReader to an Android tablet, or use an Android phone.
Reasons:
1) Android tablets are as cheap, or cheaper. The Lenovo Ideapad A1 costs $199 at Amazon. The Vizio 8" costs $189 at Costco. And BF is coming up.
2) Android tablets have way more features, like cameras, and GPS, and external micor-SD slots.
3) Don't have to fuss with hacking, or worry about "bricking," or worry about voiding warranties.
4) With a real Android tablet you are not locked in to a particular vendor's format.
Here is a quick review of a few sub $300 Android tables, a few even sub $200. These tablets easily compare with the Color Nook, or Kindle Fire.
http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3500884
Why get an LED eReader when Android tables are so inexpensive?
Or better yet, get a real Android tablet like Vizio 8" or the Lenovo Ideapad A1.
Also, a dual-core 7" tablet for $200 is pretty sweet
A few years ago, that was true. Today, Android tablets are as cheap, or cheaper. The Lenovo Ideapad A1 costs $199 at Amazon. The Vizio 8" costs $189 at Costco. And BF is coming up.
I consider the performance to be sub-standard, especially for web browsing. I suspect the Kindle fire is far superior in this regard.
Maybe I'm too skeptical. Until I actually see it, I will have some doubt. Although, you certainly could be right.
IMO: the color nook has a completely sub-standard web browsing experience. I have several mobile devices in my home that use wifi, my old 1st generation ipod touch is far faster than a color nook when it comes to web browsing.
Are you running the standard OS or third party one? Have you overclocked it?
Even then I find such a claim hard to believe, on the latest iOS update for those things they really slow to a crawl.
I never even tried the browser it came with, and have always had it clocked over 1Ghz.
Not quite - if you install the standard Nook app, you lose "More in Store" and "Read in Store"
I always found those features a little strange. Especially "read in store" -- aren't you in, y'know, a store full of books? What's the advantage of downloading the book to your device if you still have to physically be there? And then the only B&N in San Francisco closed down (not that I would have gone anyway, it was a terrible store) and the whole thing became moot.
Breakfast served all day!
Content is content ... get it where ever you want, the Nook is just a device for displaying it. Here's my anecdata: I get most of my videos off the web, converting them to the appropriate format with Handbrake directly onto an SD card which I then stick into the Nook. I get ebooks from a number of sites, reformat them (if necessary) via Calibre, and copy them over the same way. The device never has to connect to B&N or any particular network.
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Uh, yes. There's one demo showing one playing Transformers (the movie)
Ah, well there you go. It's a trick. Given that demo content, it's impossible to make out what you're actually seeing.
Breakfast served all day!
Because you can search through their online inventory and read it from a couch in the cafe, instead of wandering around to find it. Also, I'm fairly certain you could read stuff that was available online but not available in your local store.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?