Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablets vs. Apple's iPad: Who Wins?
It's the battle of the tablets, and now its Barnes and Noble's turn to fire as they set out to release their newest weapon, the Barnes and Noble's Nook Tablet.
William Lynch, the CEO of Barnes and Noble unveiled the company's new Nook Tablet and it set to be released on Nov. 17. The new Nook Tablet is the successor of the company's previous tablet known as the Nook Color Tablet. The CEO highly praised the newly released product labeling it as "the best wireless media tablet in the portable 7-inch class."
The new Nook Tablet is a 7-inch device and contains 1GHz dual-core processor, 16GB of storage and 1GB of RAM. The Nook Tablet is also said to be capable of nine hours' worth of video playback or 11.5 hours of e-reading on a single battery charge. The list price for the Nook Tablet is set at $249 which is considerably lower than Apple's iPad. Lynch also mentioned a rather startling claim during the Nook Tablet launching. According to Lynch, the company's Nook Color Tablet is the second-highest selling tablet after Apple's iPad. Samsung and other players in the tablet war may beg to differ.
Whether or not the new Nook Tablet is a threat to the iPad remains to be seen.
In terms of software, the Nook Tablet could store up to millions of ebooks as compared to the 200,000 Apple iBooks for the iPad.
As to apps, the iPad has over 140,000 apps and that is 10 times more than those for the Nook tablet. It was also recently announced that the Nook Tablet would not have full access to the applications in the Android Market. This could be a big disadvantage in the competition because the App store in iPad has thousands of applications available for their consumers. As for streaming services, Barnes and Noble won't offer any as it will rely on applications like Netflix, Pandora and other partners for that service. This is the opposite in iPad because they have their own streaming service. Regarding price and size, the Nook Tablet is considerably lower on both accounts. The Nook Tablet is around 7 inches and is priced at $249 while Apple's 9.7-inch iPad is priced around $500.