The Nook Color Vs Kindle 3- New Models Square Off For 2010 Holiday Season
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The Nook Color Vs Kindle 3- New Models Square Off For 2010 Holiday Season - Image via CrunchBase
Barnes and Noble has released its new Nook Color to compete vs Amazon’s Kindle 3, a move that recently shocked many consumers and critics alike.
The Kindle 3 seemed to be sitting pretty, all features and prices ever so slightly one-upping the Nook. The Kindle released a new model that was WiFi only at a cheap price, with improved contrast, smaller and sleeker design, lighter weight, more standard memory, battery life that lasts up to a month on one charge, and in a couple colors to boot.
Barnes and Noble released its own low priced WiFi version in response. However the rest of the device remained the same except for the software update that happened in April from Barnes and Noble, fixing many of the reported bugs from a year earlier. Many looked at Barnes and Noble and thought,”‘that’s it?”.
Well, it seems that Barnes and Noble had something up its sleeve after all, the Nook Color. The new device has a high resolution IPS color touch screen, allowing for a 178 degree viewing angle. The device has an expandable memory starting at 8GB, a feature that could have Apple sweating with its memory-based pricing structure.
But the Nook Color is no iPad. It has a 7 inch screen and doesn’t have thousands of applications to choose from. However, the device can indeed play video, store pictures, play audio, and surf the web and email, much like the iPad.
So why would someone buy the Kindle 3? It will come down to a choice for the consumer. Amazon is banking on the fact that many people read books for the enjoyment of reading alone. They hope consumers will want a dedicated device to reading books.
The Nook Color has opened up possibilities for the reading experience, and closed off other possibilities as well. For instance, the consumer can read a full color digital magazine on the device, however the battery life is now only 8 hours with wireless turned off, reducing freedom from the electrical socket. There is obviously a give and take.
You can click for prices, information, and a more detailed comparison of the Nook Color vs Kindle 3 .
Posted by Jeff Carson
on Nov 12 2010. Filed under Business & Tech, Featured News.
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Nook Color is better for reading than iPad and better for everything else than Kindle. Nook Color is better for $249. Nook Color screen is supposed to be better (less reflective) for reading than iPad thanks to new LG screen with anti-reflection coating. It allows to watch videos, listen to the music, view Office documents and PDF’s. 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. If you prefer e-Ink screen, the original Nook is still available from BN.
Nook Color specs:
- $249 with free shipping
- 7 inch Color LG Touchscreen 16 million colors with anti-glare coating 1024 x 600 delivering 169 pixels per inch.
- 8GB built in memory expandable to 32 GB with microSD card.
- Formats supported: EPUB, PDF, XLS, DOC, PPT, PPS, TXT, DOCM, XLSM, PPTM, PPSX, PPSM, DOCX, XLX, PPTX, JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, MP3, AAC, MP4.
- Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n), USB port
- OS: Android 2.1
- Processor: TI 800 Mhz ARM Cortex A8-based, 45nm OMAP3621