Nook Tablet: the best ereader (and cheap tablet) on the market?

Dan Seitz Contributing Writer, Tech

Full disclosure here: I bought a Nook Color because I’m a gadget guy, and I wanted an Android tablet without paying offensive amounts of money for it. I bought a microSD card from Nook2Android, popped it in the slot and bam, instant Android tablet. And now, of course, Barnes and Noble has decided to make the Nook light-years better. In fact, if it’s as hackable as its predecessor, it might be your best bet for a cheap tablet.

nookcolor1 135x95 Nook Tablet: the best ereader (and cheap tablet) on the market?Simply put, for $250, you’re not going to find a beefier tablet, and it pretty much ruins Amazon’s Kindle Fire right out of the gate. For example, an eReader lives and dies on its memory. The Fire has 8gb of memory, only 6 of which is accessible.

The new Nook? 16GB right out of the gate, and that can be expanded with a microSD card with an extra 32GB. It’s also got a dual-core CPU and twice the RAM of the previous Nook, meaning it’s lightning fast and loads apps much more quickly.

And that brings us to the big point of contention, and why the Nook probably has the edge over the Fire: apps. Barnes and Noble is bragging about having Netflix and Hulu Plus right out of the gate, and that’s actually a big deal because Amazon, of course, would prefer that you use their Amazon Prime service, and buy your other TV shows from them. It’s really unlikely the Fire will feature any of Amazon’s competitors, and that’s a dealbreaker for any tablet.

At root, there’s a very different philosophy at work in the Kindle Fire: Amazon wants you to store all your media on their server and use the Fire to stream it, while the Nook is taking a more old-school approach. And it seems likely that the Nook is every bit as hackable as its older version, while the Fire is designed to be an appliance.

In short, the Nook is an actual computer, and can likely be made into a better one. So, if you’re looking for a small tablet, your search may be over.

Nook Tablet: Hands-On [CNET]

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