Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Without all the fanfare of either Seattle-base Amazon or Apple, Barnes and Noble has come out with a pair of new tablets. There was no big build up over weeks having us speculate at just what they will be announcing. They didn't make a big presentation, with media invited, to show off their latest products. Barnes & Noble just simply released their two new Nooks with just a simple announcement about the pending release in a couple of month and a link for pre-ordering the tablets.
With the combination of the highest resolution screen, lightest weight and expansive access to content rendered in a digital quality never before seen, NOOK HD is the world’s best 7-inch media tablet,” said William J. Lynch, Chief Executive Officer of Barnes and Noble in a press release. “We designed our larger format tablet NOOK HD+ because we think there’s big demand from customers for a super-light, extremely high quality 9-inch tablet, at half the price of the iPad. Both our 7-inch NOOK HD and 9-inch NOOK HD+ deliver an exceptional customer experience and we enthusiastically encourage customers to go to nook.com and learn more about them.”
Just like the Kindle the Nook has added HD to their name and the tablets come in both 7-inch and 9-inch. The 7-inch Nook HD cost $199 just like the Kindle Fire HD of the same size but the 9-inch starts at $269 a 30 dollar savings over the Kindle Fire HD. A couple of more differences on price between the Nook HD and the Kindle Fire HD are that the since the Kindle Fire HD has ads you have to pay an additional 15 dollar opt-out fee and with the Nook HD there are no ads and the charge is included with the Nook HD where the Kindle Fire HD sells theirs separately.
There is also several differences in features between the Kindle Fire HD and the Nook HD. The Nook HD has a slight advantage on display resolution with the 7-inch version at 1440x900 compared to 1280x800 on the same size Kindle HD. The Nook HD wins again on the weight coming in at a tiny 11.1oz. Compared to 13.9oz on the Kindle Fire HD. The Nook HD also has a microSD slot where the Kindle HD still lacks in that area. The Kindle Fire HD does win on battery life by the slight margin of 11 hours compared to 10.5 for the Nook HD. On the large version of both the Nook HD and the Kindle Fire HD the differences in features are much more closer between the two although the Nook still has a slight advantage in those same categories.
For more on the new Nook HD you might try reading:

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