androidcentral: “Leaked: Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet release date, pricing and full specs!”
Thanks to M. Francis in the Amazon Kindle community for the heads-up on this
They claim to have seen a presentation for Monday’s Barnes & Noble presser (press event).
They say it will be a $249 tablet (fifty dollars more than the Kindle Fire).
I’m going to direct you to the article for some interesting tech details (if accurate). I do want to comment on one thing…one slide mentions it having Netflix, Hulu+ and Pandora…which is exactly what I speculated in this
I don’t know whether it’s more likely to be accurate because of that…or not. 
Update: thanks to Jo MW in the Amazon Kindle community for a link to another leak article…looks like B&N may be trying to stir up some weekend buzz…or somebody’s just having fun.
Hmm…there’s a slide show there…definitely worth going through. If it’s accurate, the NOOK Touch is going to be $99 (same as the ad-supported Kindle Touch, Wi-Fi only…and a $40 drop) and the NOOKColor will go to $199 (a fifty dollar drop), same as the Kindle Fire.
Will this work?
The question is, will people pay $50 more for the rumored NOOK Tablet than for the Kindle? They are trying to appeal to people by saying you aren’t tied into the Amazon ecosystem, that you don’t have privacy concerns with their browser…and it does have twice the RAM, twice the onboard memory, and a memory expansion slot.
Again, this is all rumors at this point, but if true…yes, I think there is some market share out there for this…I’m not sure why the NOOKColor stays viable in this race, though.
Feel free to let me know what you think, even though it is just speculation at this point…we’ll know Monday.
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
November 3, 2011 at 11:24 pm |
I will always be thankful for the original Kobo device that i purchased last year. I purchased it knowing what it DID NOT DO – moreso than what it did do: I turn it ON, and it forced me to READ BOOKS. Not access Twitter nor my email accounts nor CNN Headline News: no Web browsing. I have laptops, netbooks, iPod touch 3G and 4G and an iPhone for all that. But every time i turn on my Kindle Keypad (fka, “K3″), I find myself messing ’round on the Web – because it lets me. Honest to gawd, I am going to whip out my Kindle and use it – for READING BOOKS.
November 4, 2011 at 4:10 am |
privacy concerns with their browser??? so, they’re appealing to the people who don’t care enough to research and find out what the privacy concerns are with the silk browser? EFF already went through that for Silk and gave it a check…
anyway, this should be interesting. hopefully amazon’ll be able to get netflix in the appstore in the next 2 weeks. i don’t know too many people who would be swayed just by hulu…
November 4, 2011 at 11:59 am |
Thanks for writing, tuxgirl!
We’ve seen Barnes & Noble play on fear before:
http://ilmk.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/barnes-noble-woos-amazon-associates/
It’s one of those things where people should hypothetically just hear it and vaguely remember they saw something somewhere about Congress and privacy, and if they aren’t sure, hope it’s a dealbreaker for somebody on the fence.
Amazon may be a bit complacent not closing Netflix, Hulu, and Pandora right away. My guess is that they’ll get them by the release date, but they felt like they didn’t need that at the Fire announcement. If the Monday announcement does match up with these “leaks”, I think we’ll see Amazon updating the available apps pretty quickly…not at a presser, but just pulling the rug out by changing the product page. We’ll see, though…
November 4, 2011 at 6:16 pm |
Netflix only very recently supported Honeycomb tablets. The broad variety of Android hardware makes it more difficult to develop an optimized experience that supports the entire gamut. But the fact that NC2 is probably running the same version of Android, with virtually the same processor as Fire, means that Fire will have it soon enough. I would not be surprised if they’re holding off on announcement until Fire ships (now that we kind of know NC2 is not shipping sooner). It will have more impact that way, for both Amazon and Netflix. Though Amazon and Netflix are ostensibly competitors, Netflix stands to lose customers if there are popular media devices that they have no presence on, and Amazon Appstore serves many non-Market devices, so it is a win-win for both companies. The same dynamic resulted in Netflix being available on iPad from day one, even though Apple is in the video business also.
The other canard B&N is pushing is that the people who buy Kindle with Special Offers are essentially prostituting themselves by agreeing to have advertisements on the device, and that ‘real’ readers should prefer a device without ads. When in actuality people that buy KSO do so because they like getting discounts for stuff they’re already interested in buying. It turns out that Readers are Buyers, too! The actual reading experience is not compromised in any way, and now, you can even opt out of the ads. The Nook provides no such options.
The fact that they are having to improvise a re-launch of Nook Touch implies that the new Kindles (maybe even the Sony PRS-T1 to some extent) are eating their lunch. I have one myself, and it is not a very exciting device, particularly since they have not seen fit to fix some of its problems yet.
Some people are leery of the cloud, and would prefer a media device with SD expansion. But in this case, they’ll have to pay $50 more for that option, and once you’re in that price range, there are many other options, with full Android Market access, camera, aGPS, etc. So I don’t think B&N is going to be as successful with NC2 as they may once have hoped.
November 4, 2011 at 7:06 pm |
The EndGadget article has a black & white photo. Nice leak…
November 5, 2011 at 2:39 pm |
[...] you go charging down the hill and charging up that credit card, there are very strong rumors that the NOOKColor will be $199 on Monday…everywhere. The rumor includes that there will be [...]
November 15, 2011 at 7:14 am |
ebook reader…
[...]androidcentral: “Leaked: Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet release date, pricing and full specs!” « I Love My Kindle[...]…