Spec wise it beats the Kindle Fire in just about every category (More RAM, more Storage Potential, Better Battery Life). The question is will B&N stick with it and keep pushing.
Two things make me think they will.
1. They recently made a deal with Appcelerator to favor apps built using those tools and to provide more support for those developers (for those who don't know Appcelerator allows you to write iPhone and Android apps with web tools like RoR, Python, Javascript, CSS, etc...)
2. They are offering support in all B&N stores.
So they're being developer friendly to get more apps created (as opposed to Amazon where you have to give them permission to give your app away just to get in their store). And they're working to draw in casual users.
To my eyes that makes the Nook Tablet a very attractive offering both for consumers to buy and developers to build on.
I've had two friends get overnighted new kindles to replaces ones that they broke.
Amazon's customer service is, quite frankly, better than almost any brick and mortar store's customer service. And I don't even have to leave my home.
It's an interesting play on B&N's part, and I don't really see how it can play out well for them. They've more or less acknowledged that the future of almost all of their wares is digital. Can the expense of running brick and mortar stores for customer service possibly be worth the added cost to the customer? Seems doubtful.
> Can the expense of running brick and mortar stores for customer service possibly be worth the added cost to the customer?
Increase the size of the coffee area, have stand-up promotional materials for new releases, figure out some digital equivalent of autographed copies so that authors can continue to have readings, etc.
> ... I don't really see how it can play out well for them.
> Can the expense of running brick and mortar stores for
> customer service possibly be worth the added cost to
> the customer? Seems doubtful.
Certainly hasn't worked out well for Apple. ... Oh, wait ...
Combined with free wifi, books that can be browsed, in store returns, they've possibly got a chance.
Will it convert me? No, I'm a Prime user with some positive AMZN customer service experiences under my belt. So, maybe B &N needs to do more courting of the tech crowd.
I had the same experience. My Kindle 2 stopped working, and I got a new one for free in the mail two days after I called Amazon up about it. On the other hand, I also love my h4x'd first-generation Nook.
Amazon's only return unopened items unless faulty policy is something that is customer unfriendly compared to a typical big box store. And as far as I know, you have to go to a shipping office to ship the return back. Can you just print a label and wait for the post man to come pick it up for no cost?
Not true. Amazon's response to support requests is, in my experience, "we're overnighting you a new widget. do whatever you want with the old one."
This isn't documented, but it's how things have always worked for me. Sometimes my request is "the item in the description is not the item I've received" and I eventually give up after receiving the same wrong item 4 times. That's how ingrained the process is; they don't read my email, they just mail me a replacement. Oh well.
I'm not really sure what the actual return policy is, but both of my friends had had the kindles for a while before they broke them. They then contacted Amazon to see what their options were and got replacements for free.
I just returned an unopened item. I just printed the label, put it back in the original shipping box and left it on the porch for the mail carrier to pick up.
I'm really anxious to see some comparison videos of the two. Just because the Nook Tablet looks better on paper doesn't mean it will be in practice. Amazon spent a lot of time on their interface and it actually looked pretty enjoyable to use. It looks like B&N have a tweaked interface at least, but I really want to see them used side by side.
In any event, the timing on this announcement is pretty good. I was already sold on the Kindle Fire but I didn't do the pre-order thing. Now B&N has put me in "wait to see the reviews" mode at least.
Yeah, I caught the video on Engadget too, but they don't actually flip through anything on the device, they just hold it and show you how it looks, then play a video on it.
I want to know what the interface looks like, because the interface videos I've seen on the Fire look pretty stellar. If the Tablet can't match the Fire, then all the hardware specs in the world won't make it appealing to me.
I haven't played with the new one but the Nook Color user interface sometimes strikes me as a bit glitchy in it's animations. I don't know if this is because of the Nook's hardware or because compositing in Android isn't great (I haven't personally used any other Android devices, so I have nothing to compare it to).
"The question is will B&N stick with it and keep pushing."
I work part-time at a B&N, which doesn't really give me any info that you guys don't have, but I am sure that they are dedicated to this course. Nook sales are an increasing part of store and company sales.
Some things I don't care for is that, at least at my store, they have reduced the amount of books we have in stock and there is talk of getting rid of our music/DVD department. It often seems to me, especially since we sell Nooks at other resellers, that B&N management could be laying the groundwork for leaving brick and mortar stores behind.
I think the Nook is B&N's last attempt at salvaging their company, but ultimately I don't think they can win. Amazon can destroy them in pricing and make up for it with the follow-on purchases that people will make of books, media, etc. B&N simply cannot afford (financially) to take a loss on the hardware. If they wanted to -- Amazon could start giving away Kindle's for free (or dirt cheap) to Prime subscribers and it would probably destroy B&N.
I think it could have worked a year ago. Then, they had a very plausible "reader's tablet" - something with a reading focus that does more than an e-reader, but without being as bulky/expensive as the iPad.
But they launched it with no 3rd-party apps, so instead it appeared on the market as merely a "color e-reader" - something that costs more and has less battery life, all in the service of a color screen that mostly only provides a tangibly better experience for a subset of periodicals. But nobody really reads The Economist for the pictures, and People subscribers probably aren't big players in the target demographic.
They did later bring out an app market. But it was months late and anemic; not the kind of thing that was likely to turn many heads. And they didn't push that idea hard. So Amazon comes along and does, and I fear that from here out anything that B&N could possibly do will be too little, too late.
Also, I don't know what split is like, but it is ridiculously easy to buy a Kindle in the UK (and I'm going to extrapolate that to Europe). Or if that doesn't float your boat, then just pick up a Sony or Kobo eReader - all you need to do is walk into the any major electronics retailer.
Given that this market exists, and is being actively courted by every player in this field, B&N will NEED to sort out global distribution somehow, otherwise they will get crushed. Unless of course they believe a good run in the American market alone will give them enough momentum to launch in Europe whenever they see fit... and that's probably not going to happen.
I'm already becoming dissatisfied with my Nook over B&N's failure to really come to terms with the rest of the world. The number of non-North American authors I follow whose work is for sale in Kindle editions but not Nook editions isn't exactly zero.
B&N simply cannot afford (financially) to take a loss on the hardware.
They're doing this already. People with Nooks make follow-on purchases too.
Over the past couple of years, I've seen B&N upgrade their tech and product teams and lay the groundwork for a future where they - like Amazon - have no physical locations but offer far more than books over the web, and make much of their money through the sale of digital goods.
I'm skeptical they'll catch up with Amazon, but when the actual physical bookstore is a quaint and obscure relic, I think they'll still be trucking along quite nicely. The company's already massively undervalued given their share of the ebook market.
Amazon's running an ad in which people use their smartphones to take photos of things, scan barcodes, and search to wishlist/buy things on Amazon. There's even a scene in which a guy in a brick and mortar store puts a package of diapers back on the shelf.
In other words, Amazon is actively predating on retail markets left and right, to the extent of relegating them to display models for their own merchandise. Media consumption is a big recent play, but they're moving forward on killing traditional retail, too.
Meanwhile, B&N is making competent moves in the struggle to survive. It seems almost noble in its futility.
Last month, I ordered Paw Wax for my 13 year old dog, and a Dremel 300 for my son's birthday from Amazon. I'd like to think B&N can compete, but I've never used their website and last time I bought a book from a brick and mortar location, it was sad.
I'm old enough to remember when checking out of a book store often involved a short conversation about books rather than a "No Thanks" to a Godaddy like gauntlet of magazine subscription offers and membership cards coupled with watching another human being humiliate theirself.
Sorry but I don't care if B&N puts tits in the box with their tablet, I have no love for the brand.
They really need to get that gauntlet under control. In the past, there have been times where I was on the fence about a purchase and the tie-breaker was that I did not want to deal with getting pestered about the loyalty program yet again.
I'm sure a 4.0 will be around eventually for it. I've had a lot of fun with Cyanogenmod on an NC. The only con possibly being that they didn't hook up the BT antenna in the thing or something, but you can get an earpiece bound to it from like 6 inches away (now that's some near-field communication!)
I'll add the bigger problem with CM7 is the battery. My factory Nook Color could go a week or two between charges. Picking it up and just reading a book or browsing was never a concern. Now that I'm on CM7 there is a 50% chance the battery will be totally flat when I go to pick it up.
Realistically, it doesn't matter, since even if it did run 4.0, all of the shiny new interface of 4.0 will be nowhere to be seen. Android is the base, but nearly the whole GUI is custom. And I believe the Nook Tablet is based on 2.3. The Kindle Fire is based on 2.2.
IIRC the Color runs 2.2; so I'd expect at least that. Odds are it'll be 2.3; they've had the time to work with it. Even Google's "core partners" (Moto, HTC) are claiming 2012 for ICS updates for their handsets, and they're probably getting advance access vs. B&N.
"They've had the time to work with it" doesn't register. Amazon has been a software company from its inception and has had a substantial team of talented devs working on the kindle and kindle fire projects. B&N has never been a software company, it's a functionality they've bolted on to their company lately, and we have yet to see how good that team actually is.
The specs on this are all I could hope for, except for the display. It has the same pixel count as my iPhone 4, spread out over four times the area. I don't want it to have four times the pixels, but 1280x720 would be great. Jailbroken, it'd be a perfect slab to carry.
Does B&N have the marketing infrastructure to compete with Amazon? I don't think so, the Nook reader as a device is on par or better than Kindle, yet it has had only a fraction of success as the Kindle.
Two things make me think they will.
1. They recently made a deal with Appcelerator to favor apps built using those tools and to provide more support for those developers (for those who don't know Appcelerator allows you to write iPhone and Android apps with web tools like RoR, Python, Javascript, CSS, etc...)
2. They are offering support in all B&N stores.
So they're being developer friendly to get more apps created (as opposed to Amazon where you have to give them permission to give your app away just to get in their store). And they're working to draw in casual users.
To my eyes that makes the Nook Tablet a very attractive offering both for consumers to buy and developers to build on.