Nook Tablet: Hands-on with Barnes & Noble's alternative to the Kindle Fire

PC World - The $250 Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, available starting on Wednesday, will provide solid competition for Amazon's Kindle Fire. This is Barnes & Noble's second-generation device, a follow-on to last year's Nook Color, which now drops to $200, the same price as the Kindle Fire.

Now that I've had a chance to use the Nook Tablet, I've been able to identify some of its strengths, and a few of its weaknesses. Here are my initial impressions, particularly in comparison with the Kindle Fire.

Nook Tablet

The Nook Tablet's main weakness--like the Kindle Fire's---is that it isn't a full-featured tablet. It lacks components such as built-in Bluetooth, stereo speakers, GPS, and front- and rear-facing cameras, most of which are common elements of tablets today. It also doesn't possess some common tablet capabilities, such as navigating primary tablet screens (for example, the home screen and content libraries) in landscape mode. Another omission: You can't view folders of images and movies in the included image gallery--all of the media thumbnails end up in one big bucket.

Still, the Nook Tablet's low price will make it appealing to fans of both e-readers and tablets. In fact, it's priced low enough to sway some consumers who might have been considering an iPad 2, which has a larger display, but also costs twice as much. Considering the Nook Tablet's competitive price and beefy specs, makers of other so-called "value" tablets (including Amazon, with its Kindle Fire tablet) may find that it poses a serious challenge.

And though the Nook Tablet doesn't excel as a tablet, it stays true to its roots as an LCD e-reader that is optimized for reading. That's one area where Amazon's Kindle Fire may have tripped up. The Nook Tablet's unique display has less reflectivity than the Kindle Fire's, and so is easier to read. In addition, some fonts and videos render more sharply on it than on the Fire.

Impressive Specs

Like the Amazon Kindle Fire, the Nook Tablet provides numerous reading options; but the Nook Tablet's screen is far superior.

This tablet's beefed-up horsepower--in comparison to the earlier Nook Color e-reader's--really counts. The dual-core 1GHz Texas Instruments OMAP 4 CPU and 1GB of RAM made switching from app to app a breeze, with little lag or stuttering. Movies played smoothly and stutter-free in Netflix, and the high-definition images re-rendered for Nook's 1024-by-600-pixel display looked lovely, with terrific contrast.

The Nook Tablet's display was dazzling overall. It's basically the same as the one on the Nook Color; but Barnes & Noble says that the new display incorporates some improvements from the company's display supplier.