Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet vs. Amazon Kindle Fire

After Amazon fully entered the tablet market last month with the Kindle Fire, it’s time for Barnes & Noble to follow suit with the Nook Tablet. Both companies have had e-book readers for a long time, and now both are trying to make their ways into more general computing devices like the iPad and other Android tablets. The feature sets are certainly impressive, and both corporations tout their devices as ground breaking products. But which one to choose? Is this new Nook Tablet superior to the Kindle Fire? A comparison is clearly in order.

First, let’s see how they compare on the basic hardware features. Both devices are similar in size and forms. They also have similar 7″ screens, with a resolution of 1024×600 pixels. Barnes & Noble claims that their tablet has the advantage because of a greater viewing angle, which could end up being the case, but it’s a close call. The Nook Tablet has a dual-core CPU with a lot of RAM which makes it fast and snappy to load web pages or videos. This could give it a leg up on the Kindle Fire. Where it definitively has an advantage however is on storage. The Fire has 8GB, while the Nook has 16GB and is expandable. Of course, Amazon claims most storage needs are now in the cloud, but if you want to store a lot of e-books or songs locally, this may be a big issue.

On the software side, both tablets run heavily modified versions of Android, with branded apps on top of it. Both tablets focus heavily on e-books, and they both have a large selection available. Amazon has the advantage of Amazon Prime, which offers free lending to users of the service, but Barnes & Noble has deals with many libraries which offers lending services as well. They both have their own app store, although Amazon hasn’t said yet which services will come pre-built on the Kindle Fire. The Nook is said to include Hulu, Netflix and other popular services out of the box. All the other typical Internet functions like email and web browsing are fairly similar, although Amazon claims to have the edge with its new Silk browser which speeds up browsing. On the software end of things, it’s very much a personal preference type of deal.

Both tablets are pretty inexpensive, and because of that they lack some basic tablet functions like 3G, a camera and Bluetooth. However, the Fire is cheaper than the Nook, by $50. Is the Nook Tablet worth the extra money? It depends on your needs, like if you want the extra storage, or if you’re used to B&N’s services. Overall, it’s still a close race, with both options being quite interesting. They may be the first two tablets to rival the current market leaders if only on price.