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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."
... the already-exisitng, easily-hackable previous Nook Color is now $50 less--just US$199. Nice! Very tempted...
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It should be noted that Apple is publicly happy about the Amazon Fire and its rivals because it further contributes to Android fragmentation.
Um, comparing a third-party firmware for the original Nook with the stock features of this new one isn't valid.
The better question is - Assuming that they don't lock the bootloader this time around, what will this new device be like with CM9?
If I didn't already have a Tab 10.1, I'd go for this... If the flexibility of this device is even close to that of its predecessor, it's going to be a beast with CM9. (It may get CM7 in the interim, but that's probably only going to be short-term.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
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.
I chatted with the Barnes and Nobles sales guy via their website and asked that same question. They said it will be rootable. (Gave me the warning about voiding warranty). So, I'm guessing that it is, although the sales guy is likely ignorant and just repeating what he has heard.
I am not a script!
... 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?
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.
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.
Clock the old nook up to 1.2Ghz and flash is fine.
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.
Yay, a slight revision of the Nook Color... meh. Won't someone just release a color E-ink tablet already.
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.
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make install -not war
Android's source of free content is the entire Internet. And also specifically YouTube. This is the Google way: increase access among the many Internet users, help them find their content (free and otherwise), and promote some stuff along with it as paid ads. YouTube content might mostly suck, but broadcast TV is mostly worse (and the ad model is much worse), and cable/satellite TV content people pay $50+ for each month is even worse than that. There's so much more YouTube and general Internet content than in paid media networks that there's something for everyone.
Android will do just fine, as it has been. Even as the free content improves, partly as Google gets more and more people producing, consuming and sharing the free stuff. If Google is really successful, iTunes, AMS, BN's new thing and all the other content stores will serve to Android as much as to any other device, just as free stuff gets served to iPhones, Kindles and Nooks.
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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."
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.
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.
Or try comparing a Nook Color w/ CM7 to a Nook Tablet w/ CM7 if you don't want to troll... How nice would that be on a machine with twice the processor, RAM and Flash internally, and potentially a better screen?
Not saying I'm going out right away to replace my Nook Color (w/ the NookieComb ROM), but if you want to make a fair comparo give the CyanogenMod guys some time to spin a version for the new Nook Tablet. It won't take long at all and I suspect it's going to make a few of us want to upgrade our hardware.
+1 Disagree
Well, they're both Android. In another thread, I mentioned that the lack of the marketplace is pretty much a deal breaker, if that's what you're talking about. The Nook Color will boot off its SD card, which makes it a lot easier to install a full featured copy of Android. The Fire lacks an SD card.
The point is, when you're talking about what is rapidly becoming a commodity item, (android tablets) the issue becomes more and more what the individual features are than how many units have been sold. After all, if we're just going on how popular something is, we'd all own ipads.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.