Both the Nook Tablet from Barnes and Noble and the Kindle Fire from Amazon have hit the shelves and the battle of the cheap tablet PCs have started in earnest. There have been a lot of reports, reviews, and tablet PC comparison articles floating around the web with regard to the Nook and Fire, and a few things have surfaced that may sway consumers from one table to the other – or vice versa.
Choice vs. Vending Machine
William Lynch, CEO of Barnes and Noble, has referred to Amazon’s Kindle Fire as a “vending machine” to the online ecommerce giant’s services. This “Choice vs. Locked into Amazon’s ecosystem” theme was the same tune Claudia Romanini, director of developer relations at B&N, was singing during an interview with Fast Company. According to Romanini, the Nook Tablet already has Netflix, Hulu, and Pandora preloaded into the device, giving their users options as to where they can get their content. The implication is that Amazon doesn’t offer the same choice.
Most tablet PC comparison reports and analysts have expressed some confusion over this marketing strategy. The fact is, the Kindle Fire has these apps available too – just not preloaded into the device.
Content Lockdown
Speaking of openness, reports have surfaced that both companies have taken some measures to ensure that their customers purchase content from the respective app stores. Barnes and Noble used the bigger storage and expandable memory slot as a key selling point, though it’s been recently reported that only 12GB of the Nook Tablet’s 16GB internal memory can be used for user content. And out of that 12GB, only 1GB can be used for content obtained from sources other than B&N. If you opt to use the external memory for storing your content, you may run into problems as well, since B&N apparently used a locked bootloader to prevent hacking.
Amazon, on the other hand, has a limited 8GB internal memory with no memory slots. This may have been done to influence its users into streaming content from the store. Also, the Kindle Fire has a preloaded Kindle app for reading ebooks, and apparently, other apps and ebookstore are available from the Amazon Appstore, but you won’t be seeing them in the Kindle Fire (quite literally). Competitor ebookstores are visible if you view the appstore from your PC, but not if you’re browsing from your Kindle Fire.
Tablet PC comparison wars are still on, and it seems that though both B&N and Amazon have made it clear that their tablet PCs aren’t so open for third party content, they’re still major tablet contenders for this holiday season. Who’ll emerge the winner? Will price prevail over specs? We’ll see in the next couple of months.