Tablets might be grabbing most of the attention of the tech media, but there is a vicious war being waged on the e-book reader front too, with Barnes and Noble (B&N) laying siege to Amazon’s dominance. The latest salvo from B&N is the Nook Color, which from its specs at least, seems to be in the middle ground between a tablet and an e-book reader, and will be available from November 19. It certainly seems to score on the specs front with a 7 inch 1024 x 600 touch screen (yes, no buttons!), 8GB on board memory with space to accommodate a 32GB memory card too, and built-in Wi-Fi for surfing the Web. Of course, it has support for most e-book formats (though not for AMZ, Amazon’s book format) and also lets you play music and watch videos. And all for $249, which is not too terrible an option when you consider that the relatively uncomplicated Amazon Kindle DX ships for $379. In fact we have no idea about the OS – we had expected Android, but there is no mention of it on the product page. Still, given the touch screen capabilities of the device, some might even consider it as a low cost tablet.
So is it time for Amazon to start worrying? We will take a closer look at the device specs and get back. Watch this space!
Heard its slow, sluggish.
The Nook Color will not run apps straight out of the Android Market, but that does not mean it cannot run them. In fact, they have done a lot of tests on apps from standard Android smartphones and they pretty much run on Nook Color, which has Android 2.1 under the hood. (The Nook native interface and apps are just standard Android application layers.) Barnes & Noble special Nook SDK runs on top of the standard Android one and gives developers access to exclusive extensions and APIs for the Nook and its interface. So porting Android apps is not difficult. B&N says it is more like optimising them for Nook than porting them.
Nook Color screen is supposed to be better (less reflective) for reading than iPad.