Sunday, January 1, 2012

Impressions of Barnes and Nobel Nook Tablet

I saw a co-worker carrying his Barnes and Noble Nook Color around a lot, so I asked him about it. He said that he was pleased with it. So when the Nook Tablet came out, I compared it with the Amazon Kindle Fire and decided that the Nook Tablet has a better package over all: more RAM (1GB vs. 512MB), more flash storage (16GB vs. 8GB), and the Nook has a microSD slot that the Fire does not. So when B&N offered me a $25 discount as a former Borders' customer, I got one for my daughter.

But now I am starting to have second thoughts. The Nook feels nice when used for reading books purchased from Barnes and Nobel, but that seems to be the only thing it is good for. Since we have not had time to watch videos on it yet, I can't really say much about that except that video streaming from the same providers, Hulu and Netflix, should not differ much from using the same apps on a similar Android tablet.

The main problem is that, the Nook limits user storage to 1GB out of the 16GB in total, which means in practical terms, one can not install much of anything on it. I did install the Amazon App Store on it via side-loading. Now it refuses to install Kindle for Android.

Looks like it's time to root the device -- I was going to wait until the device is out of warranty. I understand that B&N is competing with Amazon. But limiting what the device does for its customers is not the right way to do it.

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