Nook Tablet: pictures of Barnes & Noble’s attack on Amazon

November 7, 2011 By Jeffrey Van Camp

Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet unveil - a fake Nook Tablet

Photos of the Nook Tablet and Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch's scathing attack on the Kindle Fire

Barnes & Noble didn’t just unveil the Nook Tablet today: it waged war on Amazon. Unlike any presentation I’ve seen in some time, B&N ripped apart Amazon’s new Kindle Fire, disgracing its design as a ripoff of the BlackBerry PlayBook and criticizing Amazon for locking customers into the Kindle media stores. The harsh words were backed up by a strong showing as well. We found the Nook Tablet to be a fiercely competitive new device, delivering superior performance to the Kindle Fire in a number of ways and still delivering a low price of $250–more expensive than the $200 Kindle Fire, but cheaper than everything else.

The pictures above highlight some of the slides Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch showed at the event as well as the Nook Simple Touch ($100), Nook Color ($200), and Nook Tablet ($250) in action. Check out our full impressions of the Nook Tablet for more info.

Showing 6 comments

John Go at 8:38pm 8th November 2011 Nook Tablet is $224 if sign up for Barnes & Noble membership. E-Ink Nook Simpletouch at $99 (without ads) has twice the battery life of Kindle Touch, faster page turns than Kindle Touch, 80% less flashing on page turns than Kindle touch, and microSD card slot to expand capacity that neither Kindle has. Nook Tablet is clearly the superior device over Kindle Fire. Not just 11.5 hours battery life but 9 hours of video playback time - that's vs. 8 hours for reading and 7.5 hours of video playback on Kindle Fire (even that 7.5 hours will not hold true in tests, video playback drains battery much more than reading) 1 GB RAM Vs. 512 MB RAM of Kindle Fire, 16 GB content capacity plus 32 GB via microSD card vs. 8 GB capacity of Kindle Fire with no expansion slot. Fully laminated HD screen for reduced glare vs. no lamination of Kindle Fire. Bulit-in and optimized Netflix and Hulu plus with millions of movies/shows vs. 100K movies/shows of Amazon store. Nook Tablet has built-in mic for Skype voice conferencing and dictations to speech recognition software. Nook already has Cloud as all eBooks in your online library are stored there as well as downloaded to your device. For streaming movies and shows it has Netflix and Hulu Clouds. Twice better device - in both technical specifications and content offering.
Ian Bell at 5:57am 8th November 2011 Jeff, did they speed up the Nook? One of my gripes with the first gen was how slow it is sometimes to browse books, turn pages etc. I'm wondering if they added a better processor or more memory.
1. Jeffrey Van Camp at 10:49am 8th November 2011 Definitely faster. Their recent software update has sped up the original Color a bit, but it was still very laggy. The Nook Tablet is dual-core with a full gig of ram. I was really impressed by how smooth and fast it ran and how colorful/bright the screen was. It wowed me more than the Kindle Fire. Whether that speed holds up when you're doing multiple things, I dunno yet. It's quite usable though, finally.
Luis Lauranzon at 1:30pm 8th November 2011 I think the nook tablet looks like a nice device. But they don't have the ecosystem that amazon has, which is why I've pre-ordered the kindle fire. The B&N CEO was very unclassy & you didn't see this type of behavior from Bezos during his announcement.
1. Ian Bell at 5:56am 8th November 2011 Agreed, it's why Apple is so successful. You can have the best hardware in the world, but if you don't have the ecosystem to support it with lots of great content, then it's DOA.
Stephen Mark Monteith at 8:01pm 7th November 2011 Excellent. *grins*