Barnes & Noble Releases a $50 Nook Tablet, Takes on Amazon Kindle

By Christian Pilares
NookHD Tablet
Barnes & Noble is releasing a successor to the NookHD Tablet. Caleb R/ Wikipedia

Barnes & Noble released a tablet that costs only $50 and is supposed to take on Amazon. The Nook will have a price that is comparable to the most basic Kindle and is clearly targeted at getting a huge chunk of the market.

The Nook Tablet

The Nook is a simple Android tablet that has been customized using the Nook software. It has front and rear cameras, and users can add up to 128GB of storage with the help of microSD cards. On paper, it can provide up to seven hours of battery life, which is pretty decent.

The Nook tablet has been reported several weeks ago, but Barnes & Noble has stayed silent about it and did not release anything official. As the holiday drew closer and different stores started revealing their Black Friday offers, the bookstore chain finally revealed more about its tablet.

The cheap price tag of the Nook is aimed to compete with the Kindle which is one of the popular devices in the tablet field, a market that is kind of stagnating right now. The storage capacity, screen size, and the price of the Nook is comparable to the Kindle Fire 7.

Nook Advantages

So, what are the advantages that the Nook can offer over the Fire? The most obvious advantage that would come to mind to anyone who has used a Fire before is that there should be none of the ads that pop up immediately after the device is turned on. That can be very annoying and the only way to turn those off is to pay extra.

Barnes & Noble is also offering something extra with its Readouts feature. The feature allows users to read excerpts from new books that have just been released and from articles that have been published on magazines.

The bad news for Barnes & Noble is that Amazon will be discounting the Kindle Fire 7 and will be selling it for only $33.33. Though the price reduction would only be temporary, that could still hurt the impact of the Nook. What remains to be seen is whether the Nook can offer something more than what the Amazon devices are providing users right now.

Barnes & Noble has had problems with making its own tablet. The company was forced to partner with Samsung in order to create its Nook tablets in the past, but the new tablets are made by a different company this time around.

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