Gadgetory

hi i'm scott stein senior editor at c net and has 199 the new entry-level price for a color eReader tablet certainly seems to be the case because the Kindle Fire was $1.99 last year and now the 8 gigabyte Nook Tablet has debuted at $1.99 the same price with his set of specs that matches the Kindle Fire on a number of levels last year's Nook tablet was 16 gigabytes in its storage capacity and costs $250 this a gigabyte version halves the internal storage it also has the amount of RAM down to 512 megabytes as opposed to one gig now Ram you may not really notice in fact on our test unit here seems like apps work reasonably well it's a matter of expectation and relative zippy nough storage you will notice in fact that 8 gigabytes of storage only some of it is user accessible the way the Barnes & Noble breaks down storage on the 8 gigabyte tablet 1.5 gigabytes is accessible for the Barnes & Noble Nook store that means apps and books that's not a lot of storage space where'd the rest go well some of it is in the system software and then there's 4 gigabytes that's set to be user accessible now as you may know if you are a Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet user or you may not know there are no cloud music download services or video download services like you get on the Kindle Fire sure there's Netflix Hulu Plus Pandora a lot of ways to stream music if you want music files or full-length videos that are not streamed via Wi-Fi you're gonna have to sideload that which means you connect this to a PC and take those files and put them onto your Nook Tablet that's what that 4 gigabytes of storage comes in plus you do get a micro SD card slot that's a big deal because the Kindle Fire has no expandable storage this is a micro SD card slot that's expandable up to 32 gigs like the note tablet before it now the advantages of the Nook Tablet versus the Kindle Fire 1 the quality of the screen we find that it's a little bit better than the Kindle Fire and Netflix looks even a little bit sharper streaming on the Nook Tablet and that's certainly something that Barnes & Noble is touted on the Nook Tablet devices that have come out in the past year now the cons you're not going to have that cloud music & video service so if you want to you download a movie saying watching on a plane it's a little hard to do on this in fact it's not possible unless you start using things like Netflix and Hulu Plus right now and those are subscription-based services plus there's a question of your ecosystem obviously wherever you have the most books or magazines or apps that's probably where you want to go and as far as apps go it's like the Kindle Fire it's a curated selection of apps maybe not quite as diverse as what's on the Kindle Fire but you got a lot of your major games covered Angry Birds of course and a lot of others now at the same time there is the Nook Color making it even more confusing that's the previous generation color 7-inch tablet that looks nearly identical and costs 169 now dropping the price a little bit it also has 8 gigabytes of storage so what's the difference the screens not quite so great the processor is a little slower and honestly for a 30 buck difference you might just want to go with the newest generation one for app compatibility the real question for users is going to come down to if you're gonna buy a 16 gigabyte or an 8 gigabyte version that attributable storage could be a big deal allocating only 1.5 gigabytes of storage to Nuuk store apps is very limiting now on the 16 gigabyte version that jumps up to about 12 gigabytes and that's a lot more space frankly the Nook Tablet is really nicely designed I actually like it a little bit more in its overall feel than a Kindle Fire because of its clean lines it's dedicated volume buttons off to the side and it's got that fun little carabiner over there I think it's cute I'm Scott Stein and that's a look at the eight gigabyte version of the Nook Tablet that just became available at $1.99