Barnes & Noble Officially Unveils The 7-Inch Nook Tablet
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Barnes & Noble Officially Unveils The 7-Inch Nook Tablet
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Re: Barnes & Noble Officially Unveils The 7-Inch Nook Tablet
#2Spec wise it beats the Kindle Fire in just about every category (More RAM, more Storage Potential, Better Battery Life). The question is will B&N stick with it and keep pushing.
Two things make me think they will.
1. They recently made a deal with Appcelerator to favor apps built using those tools and to provide more support for those developers (for those who don't know Appcelerator allows you to write iPhone and Android apps with web tools like RoR, Python, Javascript, CSS, etc...)
2. They are offering support in all B&N stores.
So they're being developer friendly to get more apps created (as opposed to Amazon where you have to give them permission to give your app away just to get in their store). And they're working to draw in casual users.
To my eyes that makes the Nook Tablet a very attractive offering both for consumers to buy and developers to build on.
Re: Barnes & Noble Officially Unveils The 7-Inch Nook Tablet
#3The Nooks run Android underneath, right? Any idea of what version of Android will be running on this new Nook? Too much to hope for 4.0, I imagine.
Re: Barnes & Noble Officially Unveils The 7-Inch Nook Tablet
#4The Nooks run Android underneath, right? Any idea of what version of Android will be running on this new Nook? Too much to hope for 4.0, I imagine.
IIRC the Color runs 2.2; so I'd expect at least that. Odds are it'll be 2.3; they've had the time to work with it. Even Google's "core partners" (Moto, HTC) are claiming 2012 for ICS updates for their handsets, and they're probably getting advance access vs. B&N.
Re: Barnes & Noble Officially Unveils The 7-Inch Nook Tablet
#5The Nooks run Android underneath, right? Any idea of what version of Android will be running on this new Nook? Too much to hope for 4.0, I imagine.
2.3 Gingerbread (modified)
Re: Barnes & Noble Officially Unveils The 7-Inch Nook Tablet
#6The Nooks run Android underneath, right? Any idea of what version of Android will be running on this new Nook? Too much to hope for 4.0, I imagine.
Realistically, it doesn't matter, since even if it did run 4.0, all of the shiny new interface of 4.0 will be nowhere to be seen. Android is the base, but nearly the whole GUI is custom. And I believe the Nook Tablet is based on 2.3. The Kindle Fire is based on 2.2.
Re: Barnes & Noble Officially Unveils The 7-Inch Nook Tablet
#7I think the Nook is B&N's last attempt at salvaging their company, but ultimately I don't think they can win. Amazon can destroy them in pricing and make up for it with the follow-on purchases that people will make of books, media, etc. B&N simply cannot afford (financially) to take a loss on the hardware. If they wanted to -- Amazon could start giving away Kindle's for free (or dirt cheap) to Prime subscribers and it would probably destroy B&N.
Re: Barnes & Noble Officially Unveils The 7-Inch Nook Tablet
#8The Nooks run Android underneath, right? Any idea of what version of Android will be running on this new Nook? Too much to hope for 4.0, I imagine.
IIRC the Color runs 2.2; so I'd expect at least that. Odds are it'll be 2.3; they've had the time to work with it. Even Google's "core partners" (Moto, HTC) are claiming 2012 for ICS updates for their handsets, and they're probably getting advance access vs. B&N.
Some of the other articles mention that the Nook Tablet runs Gingerbread.
Re: Barnes & Noble Officially Unveils The 7-Inch Nook Tablet
#9The Nooks run Android underneath, right? Any idea of what version of Android will be running on this new Nook? Too much to hope for 4.0, I imagine.
I'm sure a 4.0 will be around eventually for it. I've had a lot of fun with Cyanogenmod on an NC. The only con possibly being that they didn't hook up the BT antenna in the thing or something, but you can get an earpiece bound to it from like 6 inches away (now that's some near-field communication!)
Re: Barnes & Noble Officially Unveils The 7-Inch Nook Tablet
#10I think the Nook is B&N's last attempt at salvaging their company, but ultimately I don't think they can win. Amazon can destroy them in pricing and make up for it with the follow-on purchases that people will make of books, media, etc. B&N simply cannot afford (financially) to take a loss on the hardware. If they wanted to -- Amazon could start giving away Kindle's for free (or dirt cheap) to Prime subscribers and i…
I think it could have worked a year ago. Then, they had a very plausible "reader's tablet" - something with a reading focus that does more than an e-reader, but without being as bulky/expensive as the iPad.
But they launched it with no 3rd-party apps, so instead it appeared on the market as merely a "color e-reader" - something that costs more and has less battery life, all in the service of a color screen that mostly only provides a tangibly better experience for a subset of periodicals. But nobody really reads The Economist for the pictures, and People subscribers probably aren't big players in the target demographic.
They did later bring out an app market. But it was months late and anemic; not the kind of thing that was likely to turn many heads. And they didn't push that idea hard. So Amazon comes along and does, and I fear that from here out anything that B&N could possibly do will be too little, too late.