Nook Tablet: Faster, Thinner, Lighter Kindle Fire Killer?



The Nook Tablet isn’t a completely new product or a radical overhaul of the Nook colour. It’s still a 7-inch tablet packing wi-fi and 16GB of storage, but now with a dual core processor. How does it stack up against the Kindle Fire?

Giz Au Editor’s Note: Barnes & Noble’s Nook lines still have no official Australian launch date, although if you’re particularly keen it is possible to import them. B&N don’t support international book sales, however.

The Nook Tablet is rumoured to be running a TI OMAP4 processor and using the same display as the Nook colour. The Nook still uses a custom UI built on top of Android, which means that this isn’t an all-purpose, run-any-app tablet, but one geared towards very specific functions (books, magazines, email, web-browsing, videos, etc.). But it packs 1 gigabyte of RAM and has 11.5 hours of battery life.


Barnes and Noble’s battery life evaluations have always been tricky, but before they said that if you read for 30 minutes a day, at a pace of a page per minute, the battery life would last two months (with wi-fi off). Now they say it will last for two months if you read an hour a day (provided all the other variables remain constant).

So how does the Nook Tablet compare to the Kindle Fire? The Nook Tablet is very similar to Amazon’s Kindle Fire. But the differences that do exist–in specs, price, and usability–are telling. Here’s how it all breaks down.

Let’s start with looks: the two both have 7-inch IPS displays, although the Nook Tablet is a little longer and beefier than the Kindle Fire. It also retains that odd carabiner-friendly rung in the lower right-hand corner, which, fine. The weight difference isn’t much, but given that both tablets are already so much heavier than their E-ink ebook reader counterparts, every little bit may count over marathon reading sessions.


The wider gaps are on the inside; the Nook Tablet sports 16GB of storage and 1GB of RAM, compared to 8GB of storage compared 512MB of RAM on the Kindle Fire. And when you compare the two on specs alone, it’s no small temptation to think that Amazon is outclassed. Amazon, though, holds most of your goodies in its cloud for you. That’s potentially inconvenient for long, Wi-Fi-less trips, but the gap should be immaterial around the house, etc.

As for RAM, that can be a bit misleading as well; the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S seem to get along just fine with 512MB, while there are 1GB Android phones and tablets that can get burpy. What we can go on, though, is our hands-on impressions of the two tablets.

In action today, the Nook Tablet’s performance wasn’t entirely promising. The custom built UI was noticeably sluggish, as was the web browser. On the plus side, the media apps ran smoothly. Our first look at the Kindle Fire, on the other hand, revealed shockingly fast and fluid performance even though it’s got weaker specs on paper. The Amazon Kindle appears to be built on cheaper hardware but incorporates technologies like Amazon’s Silk web browser to help the product run like a much stronger machine. Aside from the pre-loaded media apps, we just don’t know if Barnes and Noble found clever ways to optimise its device as well. We’ll have to wait until the products are available for a full test to know for sure if these impressions are true.

And then there’s battery life: Nook appears to have the edge, with a reported 11.5 hours of reading time and 9 hours of video, compared to 8 hours of reading and 7.5 hours of streaming playback on the Kindle Fire. Listed battery life and actual are often worlds apart, but one imagines that Amazon’s not underselling itself by nearly three hours. Advantage Nook.

Besides the obvious considerations over speed and performance, the Nook Tablet/ Kindle Fire face off will likely come down to who can offer better services to customers. Both Amazon and Barnes and Noble offer extensive book ecosystems–fine–but what other media services will run on each device? We already know the Nook Tablet will come preloaded with apps for Netflix, Hulu, and Pandora. The purchase of a Kindle Fire comes with a free month of Amazon Prime, which means buyers will at the very least have access to Amazon Instant Video. They’ll also be able to tap into the Amazon Appstore for additional Bezos-curated content.

The most noticeable difference between the two 7-inch tablets, though, is the price tag. At $US250 the Nook Tablet is $US50 more expensive than the $US200 Kindle Fire. It seems as though Barnes and Noble expects the specs to justify the cost, but again: real world impressions indicate that they may not be all that far apart.

Without a full review, it’s obviously too soon to tell which low-priced Android ebook reader will be crowned. But the little differences add up–and maybe not to 50 bucks. [Amazon and Barnes and Noble]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.