Barnes & Noble Announces A New $50 Android Tablet (teleread.org)

Next Friday Barnes & Noble will release a $50 Android tablet, competing against Amazon's tablets with a more-open version of Android. Long-time Slashdot reader Robotech_Master writes: The specs are similar to slightly better than the $50 Fire, but the kicker is this tablet will ship with plain-vanilla Marshmallow Android 6.0 and the Google Play utilities -- unlike the Fire, which limits its users to only those apps Amazon deems suitable to offer. Might this be enough to rescue the ailing Nook brand?
If you truly care about your app ecosystem, this would at least save you the trouble of having to root your tablet just to install apps from the Google Play Store.

Comments

Re:And to think they could have had it all

[dgatwood]

The problem was that their heart was never in it. Competing with a big company means taking big risks, and continuing to take big risks even when the numbers don't go up as quickly as you'd like them to. It means creating products that are innovative, and doing it on a regular cycle. And it means creating the perception that you stand behind your products and will continue to do so over the long term. B&N has completely failed at all of those things, and that's why we're all so shocked that they're even bothering to release a new model rather than dropping out of the e-Book business entirely.

At this point, B&N has been out of the hardware business for several years, with the possible exception of their E-ink model. Everything else is built by other companies. But even when they were still designing hardware, they kept shipping new hardware that didn't even run the latest version of Android on the day it shipped. Heck, their latest E-ink hardware was behind by two major versions on the day that it shipped. And AFAIK, they never update them to run current versions of the OS, so anybody who wants to stay reasonably current depends on third parties to hack together support. As a tablet, their products start out as crap and get further behind as they age.

If B&N really want to compete, they need to get serious, and make a pledge to always ship the current version of Android on all of their hardware. They need to provide OS updates for existing customers so that the products don't get farther and farther behind. Basically, they need to take the OS side of things seriously.

They also need to keep their RMSDK versions up-to-date so that book publishers won't keep having to cater to the most ancient devices with the oldest, most broken version of Adobe Digital Editions wrapped in a Nook UI.

They also need to make options available with faster hardware. I mean sure, there's something to be said about making a low-end device that they can build cheaply, but they ought to also have a step-up device that's a serious Android tablet with all the Nook-ization. Otherwise, people who want a tablet that's actually usable as a tablet will install Nook's Android app on a device from someone else, which means B&N loses not just market share, but also the psychological advantage of folks thinking of their devices as Nook tablets. As a result, they're more likely to also install the Kindle app, and they have less incentive to buy books from B&N.