Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Nook Color Becomes a Full-On Android Tablet

Folks, I love free-market competition. And with this great move, Barnes & Noble -- which has been circling the drain -- may very well bounce back and become a serious competitor to Amazon for the ereader market:

Barnes & Noble has touted its Nook Color as “the reader’s tablet” since the product’s inception. But after the company announced the launch of an Android OS update and extended features on the device this week, we’re not sure what to call it anymore.

E-reader? Tablet? E-tablet?

Version 1.2 of the Nook Color’s firmware launched Monday morning, bringing Android OS 2.2 (Froyo) to existing users of the e-reader tablet. The software includes expansions to web surfing on the device, including Adobe Flash and Air support, as well as the ability to receive e-mail.

The company also announced the launch of the Nook App store. Customers are now able to download and use apps on their Nook Color devices, while still being able to purchase books from the Barnes & Noble reading catalog. . . .

Read it all.

I love this because, as a writer, it offers me another vast and growing marketplace for peddling my future ebooks. The Nook Color keeps B&N in the ereader ball game with Amazon's Kindle. The financial pressure now moves to Apple, whose iPad is priced much higher. If Apple is compelled to slash iPad prices to compete with the Nook, that will even further expand the marketplace for ebooks, and accelerate the demand for them.

1 comment:

Robert Winefield said...

I now own a Kindle 3 and a Nook color.

Both are excellent in their own way.

The former is much better for reading simple text documents. The text is crisp and the screen is not tiring to the eye.

The Nook color on the other hand is far far better at reading diagram heavy powerpoint, word and pdf documents. And it has expandable memory though no native means to move files about and delete them.

At the moment it lacks the ability to annotate pdfs, docs and ppts and I hope that some android apps will come down the pipe to address this. And because the Nook colour is powered by android (& so has scope to expand its features further) I decided that I could get one now and not have to wait to see what Amazon's color Kindle (due late 2011) can do.

I use the former for recreational literature and the latter for professional scientific literature.

Best part: both are affordable and so I can (after a little saving) afford to own one of each for less than the price of an iPad.