The gauntlet has been thrown down today by Barnes & Noble with a device by the name of NOOK Tablet, an upgrade of their NOOK Color e-reader, a release here clearly aimed directly at Amazon’s recently revealed Kindle Fire. What’s been revealed this week is several upgrades from the NOOK Color to the new NOOK Tablet including a lighter chassis, a larger processor, and a whole new reassurance that you’ll be running find with Nook Cloud for cloud storage. How does this add up against the Kindle Fire? Barnes and Noble CEO William J Lynch Jr has a few words to say on the subject, I assure you.
Starting with the fact that the IPS display made by LG for the NOOK Tablet with “Vivid View” is superior to the plain-ol’ LCD screen the Amazon Kindle has. Both device have a 7-inch display, so there’s no contention over which device has the better size, but the size inside does come up. Lynch notes that the Kindle Fire has a mere 8 GB of storage while the NOOK Tablet has 16GB, this all built-in of course, followed up by the real kicker quote.
“The Kindle Fire is deficient as a media tablet,” Lynch noted, “6GB is simply not enough for a media tablet.”
Next Lynch noted that the design for the Kindle Fire came essentially directly from the BlackBerry Playbook — as mentioned back here as well, of course. Lynch notes that the Kindle Fire just has half of the 1GB of RAM that the NOOK Tablet does, and takes an extra jab by saying that the NOOK Tablet simply has better content rendering. In-store support is the final cut, Lynch saying:
“If you wanted to get support with the Fire, where would you go? Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle?” – Lynch
The Barnes & Noble NOOK Tablet will cost $249 and will be available at the end of next week while the Kindle Fire will cost $199 and will be shipping starting on November 15th. Take a peek at our early look at the Amazon Kindle Fire and stick around here on SlashGear for our hands-on roundup for the NOOK Tablet in just a bit!
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