Nook Tablet review
DOES THE NOOK TABLET HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO EXTINGUISH THE KINDLE FIRE? — Exactly one year ago, Barnes & Noble made an interesting move, one no other company in the tech industry had yet been bold enough to make: it released the Nook Color for just $249.99.
Context & Ripple Effects
Barnes & Noble set this up a year ago with the Nook Color at $249.99 — the first mainstream tablet priced below the iPad that reviewers took seriously — and by mid-2011 it had paid off: Consumer Reports put a Nook ahead of the Kindle in its e-reader ratings for the first time in June. The company then announced the $249 Nook Tablet on November 7th, positioning it explicitly as a Nook Color replacement with upgraded specs across the board.
What makes this review matter is the timing and the target: it lands one day after the November 17th launch, directly into the holiday-season fight with Amazon's Kindle Fire at the same $249 price. B&N is marketing 16GB of internal storage versus the Fire's 8GB, but only 1GB of that space is open to non-Barnes & Noble content — and the spec claims are already drawing accusations of exaggeration, repeating an earlier pattern.
First-order effects
- Holiday shoppers choosing between two $249 tablets get a spec sheet where headline numbers mislead: the Nook Tablet's 16GB advantage over the Kindle Fire shrinks to 1GB of usable third-party storage, making B&N's content lock-in the real purchase decision.
- Amazon now faces a direct hardware rival from the bookseller it displaced in e-readers, just months after Consumer Reports' June finding that a Nook had beaten the Kindle in its ratings.
Second-order effects
- With both devices priced identically, Amazon's likely counter is on price or storage terms rather than specs, forcing a race to the bottom in the sub-$250 tier where neither player makes hardware-margin money.
- The 1GB restriction sets a precedent rivals can copy or attack: if locked-down storage proves acceptable to buyers, every content retailer gains a template for converting cheap flash into ecosystem leverage.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the budget tablet market consolidates around content ecosystems rather than hardware differentiation — devices become loss-leader storefronts, and independent app or media sellers find their access governed by whichever retailer controls the storage.
- B&N's parallel push asking U.S. regulators to investigate Microsoft's mobile-device patent practices signals that the smaller players expect the next battleground to be legal and licensing costs, not just retail shelf space.
The trend: Sub-$250 tablets are becoming content-ecosystem playbooks, where retailers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon compete on locked-in media access and pricing power rather than device specifications.