Barnes and Noble recently introduced price cutting on its tablet line, alongside the introduction of support for Google Play. Many feel the reason that this move was made was to be more competitive against other tablets including the Kindle Fire line, others say it is a way to push remaining stock before bowing out of the tablet game.

Now it looks like an internal document has surfaced suggesting that Nook is ending its involvement in creating Android-based tablets by 2014, instead looking to have partners create devices designed around Nook’s software and store. Additionally, the reports claim Microsoft is looking to take its investment in the Nook one step further, buying it out.

It’s really hard to say whether this is true or not, and if it is, what Microsoft plans to do with the Nook line. They could strongly integrate Nook services into their Windows 8 tablets, and they could also spin-off their own Nook-centric tablets.
If this happened, the tablets would probably run on some form of Windows 8 or Windows Embedded as opposed to Android, of course.

What do you think, if the rumor is true, should Microsoft buy Nook? Or should Nook continue to ride out its new strategy of aggressive pricing and Google Play support and see where that takes the company first? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

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In a press release Friday, Barnes and Noble announced that they would be having a special limited time offer on their tablets. More specifically, when you purchase a Nook HD+ between March 24, 2013, and March 31, 2013, you will also receive a free Nook Simple Touch E Ink reader, a $79 value.

The Nook HD+ will run you $269 and you can pick it up both of your new Nook tablets at any Barnes and Noble retail store or online at www.nook.com. If you are not familiar, the Nook HD+ comes with a 1.5Ghz dual-core processor, a 1920×1280 display, and 16GB (32GB @ $299) of storage. It’s counterpart, the Nook Simple Touch, has a 6-inch E Ink touchscreen and a battery life of up to 2 months on a single charge.

It is possible that Barnes and Noble is using this offer to clear out for a new line of devices. In fact, it’s been a while since we last heard from the book giant. And with Amazon’s fire finally cooling off after the holiday season, this could be Prime time for a new device.

Did you find the two Amazon puns? Will you be picking up a Nook HD+ and a Nook Simple Touch this week? Let us know in the comments below.

[ Source ]

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Things keep getting better in the 7-inch tablet market. First we had the release of Google’s Nexus 7 earlier this year, giving us a near vanilla Android experience. Next, we had a worthy successor to the popular Kindle Fire in the form of the Fire HD 7-inch and 8.9-inch models. Yesterday we received word that Nook was going the club with an improvement to its Nook Tablet line.

When it comes to B&N tablets, they essentially have proven to be nothing more than e-readers with a few extra tweaks. The Nook Tablet was a major step up from the single-core Nook Color, but it still lacked the level of content of the Kindle Fire. With the announcement of a new Nook Video service and the Nook HD and HD+, B&N just brought their game to the next level.

So how does the Nook HD stand up against the 7-inch Kindle Fire? Take a look at the table below to get an idea:

As you can see, the two 7-inch versions are actually quite evenly matched. In some ways, the Nook is faster and has a few key items like MicroSD. At the same time, the Nook lacks a camera and has considerably fewer apps through its own store.

If you care about having a large selection of apps, the Amazon Kindle Fire HD is clearly the winner. It’s also worth noting that its video service is much more established than the up-and-coming Nook Video offering. Content is often key in the decision of what tablet to get, and the Fire HD is hard to beat here. If app selection is your only concern, the Nexus 7 might be an even better option, since it has access to the 675,000+ Google Play apps for Android.

Both of these offerings are quite attractive, but B&N has yet to truly “Wow!” us away from Amazon’s offering. The Nook HD is a great step in the right direction, as is the upcoming Nook Video service. If B&N keeps gunning it in the right direction, the gap between Amazon and B&N tablet offerings will continue to shrink.

What do you think? Would you rather have a Nook HD or a Kindle Fire HD 7-inch model?

The post Kindle Fire HD 7-inch VS Nook HD: How Do They Compare? appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Barnes & Noble has yet to truly excite us with their tablet offerings, but this might finally be changing. Today they announced a brand new set of tablets, the Nook HD and HD+. There is a 7-inch model with 8GB of storage for $199, and 9-inch Nook HD+ model with 32GB of storage for $299.

Is the new line a worthwhile upgrade from the Nook tablet and Nook Color? Absolutely. The Nook Tablet has a 1024×600 resolution, the HD line has a 1440×900. Other changes include Android 4.0 as the basis, not Android 2.3. Not enough of a reason? How about a dual-core 1.3GHz (HD) or 1.5Ghz dual-core processor (HD+), as opposed to the slightly slower 1GHz dual-core in the Nook Tablet? All around, this is a worthwhile upgrade. The screen is crisper, the graphics are better. The Nook Color is nothing more than a color e-reader with a few apps, the Nook Tablet is slightly above that in capability. The Nook HD and HD+ are both in an entirely different league than any of B&N’s previous offerings.

The new tablets look pretty good, and with a new “Nook Video” service coming this fall, there are more reasons to own a Nook HD tablet than ever before. Are the changes enough to truly set them apart from the Kindle Fire HD and the Nexus 7? Yes and no, but we’ll take a look at that in another upcoming post.

[ source ]

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A big reason why many of these e-book companies have transitioned to web-based programs has to do with the fact that Apple locks down the e-reader app experience, since you can’t link to your own store within a non-Apple e-reader app. You’d think this new move would mean that iPad and iPhone users would ditch the Nook app in favor of purchasing and reading from the browser, but unfortunately the “Nook For Web” Experience seems limited only to PC and MAC.

Attempting to run Nook For Web on any non-PC or MAC browser will result in an error saying you have an incompatible browser. This is a shame because it would be interesting to see Nook For Web make its way to any device that can access the web, such as the iPad, Android tablets, and even portable gaming systems like the PS Vita and 3DS.

According to the company, Nook for Web works in any major PC or MAC web-browser such as IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari- though there is no word on whether or not they intend to open that up to allow Nook For Web on mobile devices.

In order to get more people to try out the new web-based Nook system, B&N is offering six titles for free: Map of Bones by James Rollins, The Vow by Kim Carpenter, Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell, The Boxcar Children Summer Special by Gertrude Chandler Warner, Brave by Tennant Redbank and Perfect Island Getaways by Patricia Schultz. The books can be downloaded for free up until July 26^th.

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When you combine this investment with the recent news that Microsoft is re-tooling its multimedia service, Zune, with a new Xbox-branded multi-platform music/video service, it starts to become clearer that Microsoft is pulling out all the stops to make sure they have as much content as possible when Windows 8 tablets hit the scene. Overall, this is just being smart on Microsoft’s part, after all, Apple has already established millions of apps and multimedia content, so Windows 8 will need all it can muster if it’s going to convince anyone to migrate from the iPad, or even an Android tablet, to their new ARM and x86 tablet devices.

As for why Barnes and Noble would find this partnership useful? Beyond the fact that they get a massive $300 investment? Separating its Nook line from its brick-and-mortar and non-digital book offerings might be a way the company can better appeal to more users and other markets internationally, at least according to Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps.

Will the move prove to be a successful one for Microsoft against competitors like Apple and Google? Or for that matter, will it give B&N an edge over Amazon’s Kindle line? Only time will tell for sure.

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This latest Nook costs $139 and will become available in early May, though Barnes & Noble has started taking preorders on its website and in stores. Barnes & Noble isn’t making changes to the other Nook readers in its lineup, including the light-free but otherwise similar $99 E-Ink-based Nook Simple Touch reader.

A new war for lighted E-Ink displays has now began. You know, because turning on that lamp was so hard before. I suppose this could come in handy in certain situations like reading outdoors while camping, or just simply when you are out of reach from an easy reading lamp.

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The post New Nook Has A Front-Lit eInk Display, Shipping May appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

It looks like more of a proof of a principle than anything useful for an ordinary NOOK Tablet user. ARM port of Ubuntu smaller distribution made by AdamOutler and Loglud of XDA-Developers’ fame runs on NOOK Tablet since December 9 already. Engadget seemed to notice it just the other day, and even now it looks like they missed the true significance of this development they covered.

Nobody out of AdamOutler, Loglud, and other developers for NOOK Tablet ever had the idea of porting a desktop Linux, Ubuntu, or not, for its own sake. Their task is the investigation of the ways it might take to circumvent a locked bootloader of NOOK Tablet that apparently loads only cryptographically “signed” stock kernel and other critical software. Locked firmware is nothing new in the world of smartphones’ firmware. Plenty of past developments for methods of circumventing rigid security measures was centered on successful compilation of 2ndInit, kexec and some other sophisticated hijacking tools that may open the path to running custom firmware on such a device. So far, attempts to run a non-signed custom kernel were not successful for many devices. On top of that, implementations of security measures are different and varying wildly for different devices, so the success of getting “customized” ROM on one type of Droid doesn’t necessarily mean other Droid models will also comply.

However, this demo for the proof of a concept inches just a tad closer to these developer’s target: it’s not Linux (Ubuntu) on NOOK Tablet they are dreaming of. It’s CyanogenMod 9 (Android 4.0.3 out of Android Open Source Project). One day, it could be webOS, who knows.

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You don’t need to spend $800 to get your hands on a shiny new Honeycomb tablet. Indeed, you can go nuts with some Google Android 3.0 Honeycomb love by way of the Barnes & Noble Nook Color e-reader. The ROM is now available for download.

Granted, the Nook Color is not going to be anywhere near as powerful as something like the Motorola XOOM, but it also comes at a fraction of the price. And yes, it’s a real Android tablet in there.

The Honeycomb SDK preview for the Nook Color is already out and about, giving you access to graphics acceleration, accelerometer, wireless, touchscreen, buttons, and sleep/wake. You can get more deets from the folks at XDA-Dev, as usual.

[AndroidCentral]

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Hardware
It’s a 7-inch touchscreen tablet, with 1024×600 resolution 16 million color display. This doesn’t sound entirely impressive, especially since the PPI is just 169. If you compare that to the iPad’s 132 PPI it does sound great, but the iPad is 9.7-inches and not really that fantastic for rendering text to be read for long periods of time. For comparisons sake, the iPhone 4’s “retina display” is 326 ppi. Perhaps next year we’ll see an iPad with retina display.  An accelerometer allows auto-rotation from tablet to portrait mode.

Wi-Fi is its connection point. No 3G at all this time around. With 8GB memory on board and a microSD for adding 32GB more storage. It measures 8.1 x 5 x 0.48-inches and weighs 15.8 ounces. What we would expect for a tablet its size.

Battery life claims to be 8 hours with Wi-Fi turned off. This is a color LCD, so we’re not going to see any impressive performance we’ve come to expect with e-ink readers.

Software
We’re thinking this is a heavily customized Android tablet skinned the Nook way. What leads us to this is that Gizmodo reported on how apps from Android devices will be an “easy port” for the NookColor. It won’t have access to the Android Market, but by the sounds of things B&N may be making their own market. As apps will become available down the road, but only from a handful of companies.

The Nookcolor will feature a LendMe app exclusive to this device. It allows you to “lend and borrow” favorite books from friends.

Magazines and Newspapers appear to be simple static renders, or customized html sites. We’re not seeing the interactive content we have all be dreaming of since that very first Wired magazine flash video surfaced.

Social Networking
Of course this could not be left behind. You’ll have the ability to share comments about whatever you are reading with your FaceBook and Twitter friends. You can even post a quote from a novel or magazine.

Pricing & Availability
It’s going to ship on or around November 19, 2010 with pre-orders on now. B&N set the price at just $250, we’re not sure what’s running inside the ColorNook, so the low price-point may be a result of mediocre internals.

SOURCE: Barnes & Noble via Giz

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