We have been seeing a lot of good deals from Barnes and Noble recently, and now an even better one. They are currently offering both the Nook HD and the HD+ at discount rates through Mother’s Day on May 12.

You can now get the 8GB Nook HD for $149 and the 16GB version costs $179 (a $50 discount). The 9-inch 16GB HD+ will be yours for $179 (down from $269) and the 32GB model for $209 (drop from $299). The devices are available online at Barnes & Noble bookstores and on Nook.com, and at retailers including Best Buy.

The Nook tablets have suddenly become more appealing with this price drop, and also the slates now support Google Play (so access to more than 700,000 apps and games. That’s a big advantage over the Amazon Kindle Fire devices. At Amazon, the entry-level Kindle Fire has a price tag of $159, the 16GB Fire HD costs $199 and the 32GB 8.9-inch Fire HD tablet is available for $299.

As for other rivals, the Google Nexus 7 starts at $199 and Nexus 10 retails from $399. The Mac maker’s iPad mini starts at $329. Bottom-line, for the hardware, the Nook HD and HD+ are nothing less than a steal at their reduced pricing. What do you think, are you interested?

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It’s not uncommon for major tech companies to take shots at one another. Take Samsung for example. It seems like every day a new Galaxy S3 commercial comes out bashing the iPhone. But this time, Amazon is unloading on the iPad.

Take a look at the Amazon commercial:

The main purpose of the commercial is to convince you that the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ and the iPad have similar displays. However, while the iPad will cost you $499, the Fire HD will only run you $299. Sounds like a good deal right?

Well, not exactly. For one thing, the iPad is considerably bigger. Also, the iPad comes with a hoard of features that the Kindle Fire doesn’t have: larger display, more extensive operating system, larger list of apps, and so on.

Whether you are for the Kindle or against it, it is nice to see that someone is trying to take down the all-mighty Apple. It’s a shame that we all can’t just be friends. Amazon now joins Samsung in the ongoing feud to compare their products to Apple’s. It is a wonder that Apple never puts out much hate advertising.

Which tablet do you think is better? Do you think that Amazon was right to put out this video ad? Let us know in the comments below.

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Another important trend that ComScore turned up is that adoption rate on 10” devices seem to be increasing at a higher rate and that more and more data consumption is coming from these larger devices, as opposed to 7” and 5” devices. This isn’t that surprising, since the iPad is one of these larger devices and is without a doubt the leader of the tablet market right now.

While ComScore confirmed these two trends, no one will really find it that surprising I’d wager. The Android market saw a major increase, thanks to the Kindle Fire, because of its lower price point and very attractive custom UI. Meanwhile, on the higher-end devices iPad continues to lead the pack. What I’m more curious about is whether or not Windows 8 tablets will mix some of these figures up when it arrives on the market in late 2012. The tablet world is certainly expanding, but I think we’ve really only begun to experience the tip of the iceburg. One thing is for sure, this holiday season is going to be an epic one for tablet adopters, with the new iPad, the Kindle Fire and a plethora of new Windows 8 tablets on there way.

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In the past we covered an XDA Developer forum member’s semi-successful attempt to get the CM7 ROM running on the Kindle Fire. Now it seems that yet another person has gotten CM7 running, this time with more success. Jeff Benjamin has taken things a step further and has even posted a detailed tutorial and video for installation of the CyanogenMod 7 (custom ROM) on Amazon Kindle Fire.

Kindle Fire has just one hardware button, and this fact makes it extremely difficult and challenging to run ClockworkMod (CWM) recovery on the device. Nevertheless, with the concerted effort of the finest XDA developers CWM for Fire has got its unique “one-button” version and fully capable of installing CyanogenMod 7 on Fire now.

CWM is a must when dealing with early development ROMs because these highly experimental ROMs might melt your tablet in no time: I wonder why they chose to call their e-reader “Fire” in the first place? If you are good with running ADB commands from the host PC, the tutorial is quite sufficient in bringing about a desired result, its steps are illustrated by TWRP, for example) which is still under development, but the whole routine works.

What doesn’t work is sound, and probably some other regular (for CM7, at least) features. A similar “soundless” ICS port we wrote about recently may have the same reason for being mute: stock Kindle Fire ALSA sound drivers might have got some undocumented and misunderstood tweak when entered the AOSP/CM7 repositories.

With the Ice Cream Sandwich advent to the scene, there might be little interest in running CM7, a customization of Gingerbread on Kindle Fire. Still, from a developer’s point of view the CM7 on Fire experiment is a good training school and a virtual lab to test many new components that are needed to be implemented when porting ICS. So far, CM7 for Kindle Fire runs on stock Kindle Fire’s kernel which is quite insufficient to run ICS.

We’ve included the video tutorial below, but we highly recommend you checking out the site for yourself if you plan on installing this ROM:

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