Gadgetory

hey this is Joanna for The Verge and this is the Nook Tablet which is Barnes and Nobles new update to the Nook Color and their competitor to the Amazon fire and as you can see immediately from looking at the design it looks exactly like the color but that's not really a bad thing the design is really nice in hand I actually really do like the the silver finish which has replaced the black edges on the color they've also kept the hook in the left hand corner which is a nice design element but not really all that useful it's actually different from the color in two ways though it is now lighter it only weighs 0.88 pounds which makes it really nice in hand and actually on par with the Kindle in terms of weight and the second change is on the internal specs and since it's now a tablet it has a dual-core TI OMAP processor 1 gigabyte of RAM and 16 gigabytes of storage which all around is better than the Kindle the Kindle only has half a gigabyte of RAM and also eight gigabytes of storage on top of that there's a micro SD card slot right underneath the hook so you can add some more storage with the Nook Tablet you'll be spending most of your time touching the beautiful 7 inch IPS display I've actually found it to be a little bit brighter than the Kindle Fires and the viewing angles to be a bit better Barnes & Noble hasn't actually changed too much when it comes to the software it still looks a lot like the new color and it is a heavily skinned version of Android 2.3 but there are some things I really like about it the first is the fact that they have a physical home button unlike the Kindle Fire and you can select that and it brings up a list of commonly used apps and shortcuts when you're on the home screen itself you can customize it with apps and books and you can also resize the icons of course Barnes & Noble has a big book selection and they've also added some new features including a read and play and read and record function mostly for children's books that allows you to record your voice and read back some of the text well Barnes & Noble does have a good ecosystem of newspapers and magazines in its newsstand app they don't have a great ecosystem when it comes to movies and videos and music unlike Amazon they don't have a place to buy music on the device so you've got a side loaded or you've got to rely on third-party applications like Netflix and Hulu Plus to stream video the app selection also isn't that great there's Angry Birds and some other typical apps you may want but unfortunately the selection in the store just isn't as good as Amazon fire the Nook Tablet cost 250 dollars which is $50 more than Amazon's Kindle Fire and why you might get nicer hardware and better specs and double the memory a Kindle Fire definitely provides a better ecosystem for downloading music video and apps