Kindle Fire vs. Nook Tablet (tablet comparison and reviews)

Amazon’s next iteration of the Kindle e-book readers family, the Kindle Fire computer tablet, was just released in the US as of November 15. Right around the corner awaits Barnes & Noble’s own Nook Tablet, also an eReader tablet computer, designed especially as a competition for the Kindle Fire, one might say. B&N’s Nook tablet is expected to launch on November 18, though pre-orders have started ever since the tablet was announced. The close release dates of the two ereaders is not the only reason why choosing either the Kindle or the Nook should prove such a great dilemma.

You’ll find that the two tablets have more in common than you’d expect and picking the right one will indeed give you strong headaches. If you’re looking for a quick comparison between the two, skip to the end and check out the comparison table of specs.

Kindle Fire vs. Nook Tablet

Amazon’s view

The Kindle Fire is, obviously, the most expensive Kindle released by Amazon yet. Until November 15, which was the actual release date of the Fire, Amazon had sold five different models of the Kindle ereader: The Kindle, priced at just $79, Kindle Touch, at $99, Kindle Touch 3G, at the price of $149, Kindle Keyboard for $99 and Kindle Keyboard 3G at the cost of $139.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire is the first color Kindle ereader to use Google’s Android operating system. Supposedly, Amazon were inspired by RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook, redesigning the concept almost from scratch, to create the Kindle Fire as a veritable competition to Apple’s iPad, and indeed the Fire comes with dignifying specs which makes it worth its place among the top listed ereaders.

Amazon’s Kindles were received more than well so far, and so should the Fire, especially since it brings many fresh and interesting new features. Also, Amazon has been known for their competitive pricing. So low in fact, that word is out that Amazon will actually lose money for every Kindle Fire sold. Rumor has it that the Kindle is really worth $10 more than its actual price, but it is generally thought that the loss is covered by Amazon’s sales through the Amazon Store.

Amazon Kindle Fire

Barnes & Noble’s view

Barnes & Noble released the Nook Tablet as the successor of the very popular Nook Color, which, according to William Lynch, B&N’s CEO, was the second best-selling tablet in the U.S. after the iPad. It is widely believed that the Nook is going to be launched in response to Amazon’s Kindle Fire. In fact, this was made very clear by Lynch at the very announcement of the tablet on November 7. Then, Lynch introduced the new ereader in comparison and as a main competitor for the Kindle Fire.

Lynch is most likely looking to attract Amazon customers on his side or trying to impress new potential customers, especially since reports estimate that 15% of people who don’t own an eredear are planning to acquire one within six months. On the other hand, for those who already have such a tablet, Amazon seems to be selling 51% of all the ebooks, while Barnes & Noble sits well behind at merely 27%.

Although the Nook looks very similar to the Nook Color, Lynch was careful enough to point out that while Barnes & Noble worked their way up from scratch designing the tablet, Amazon were inspired from the Research In Motion BlackBerry Playbook in order to create, as Lynch put it, “a vending machine for Amazon services”. The Kindle Fire does indeed offer easy access to all of Amazon’s products and services but, in return, it doesn’t actually give full access to the entire Android Market. The Nook Tablet does pretty much the same thing for Barnes & Noble, although there isn’t actually anything more to buy besides books, magazines, movies and almost 1,500 apps from the curated Android Market specially designed for 7-inch screens.

Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet

Lynch continued through the Nook presentation introducing new features and, at the same time, attacking the correspondent feature in the Kindle Fire. He went on to underline at numerous times that any Barnes & Noble store can offer product support for customers, while in order to get support for the Kindle Fire, you’d need to go God knows where. Perhaps “to Seattle”.

However, Lynch also focused on getting the Nook slightly ahead of the Kindle by introducing new features that separate the two ereaders and could give B&N’s tablet an advantage in the eyes of the customers. For instance, he demoed on stage the ability of the Nook to Read and Record by recording his voice while reading Winnie the Pooh from the device. Due to the new microphone installed, which the Nook Color is missing, Lynch was easily able to do that, and, moreover, the playback was loud and clear through the device’s mono-speaker. The content of a recording can afterwards be saved to the internal storage or a microSD card, but it can’t be stored to Nook Cloud-based storage though.

Come to think about it, Lynch was also careful enough to express the fact that his tablet has, beside the 16GB on-board storage, which is double the amount that the Kindle Fire has, an extra microSD slot for up to 32GB of additional storage. Furthermore, B&N’s CEO mentioned that the Nook’s screen has a “Vivid View” IPS lamination buit-in display for better viewing angles and more brightness, which the Kindle Fire misses. There is much more to say about Lynch’s presentation of the Nook Tablet, since most of it was based on a comparison with the Kindle and as an attack directed toward Amazon, but in order to at least try to remain as objective as possible, we’ll get right to the point and give you the main differences and similarities of the two ereader tablets.

Hardware

Overall, the two tablets are not so different, but they do have several features and characteristic which set them apart. First and foremost they are both content-consumption tablets optimized for ebook reading. In fact, the Nook Tablet isn’t that different from its Nook Color predecessor either, but with minor improvements.

Overall aspect and design

You can tell right away that the simplistic design of the Kindle Fire is inspired from the BlackBerry Playbook, with nothing pretentious to make it look more complicated than it needs to. Beside an extremely subtle “Amazon” logo at the bottom, the “kindle” logo from the somewhat rubberized back observable only from specific angles, and a few FCC inscriptions here and there, that’s pretty much it – a big ol’ screen with a blackish band around it. Overall, the tablet looks exactly like it should – a simple and functional ereader.

The Nook Tablet isn’t that complicated either, except for its original emblematic loop hole from the bottom left corner. In fact, the Nook keeps pretty much the same aspect as the Nook Color, although Barnes & Noble opted for a lighter silver color scheme this time around in exchange for the Color’s dark grey shell.

Hardware buttons, ports and switches

Amazon’s Kindle Fire has a pair of thin speakers somehow forced between two different layers of material, which makes the sound seem like coming only from the right side of the tablet, and as the device doesn’t come with its own pair of headphones, this can sometimes prove a bit annoying. What’s even more surprising is the fact the 3.5mm headphones jack is actually located on the opposite side, right next to a microUSB port and a small power button. You won’t find any volume buttons, so that means that whenever you’ll want to adjust the volume you’ll have to make your way through the software. There’s also no HDMI output, although, in my opinion, one would be more than welcome.

B&N’s Nook though, has dedicated volume up/down buttons on the right side of the device, which commands the small speaker grill along the rear bottom. The Nook Tablet has also a home button, entitled “n”, the top-left sided power button, a microUSB port on the bottom, and, as a bonus compared to the Kindle, a microSD slot right next to the speaker. We’re missing the HDMI out here as well.

Size and weight

Compared to the PlayBook, the Kindle Fire is a little shorter, slightly narrower and just a bit thicker. It measures 7.5 x 4.7 x 0.45 in inches, and 190 x 120 x 11.4 in millimeters. Amazon’s ereader comes in at 14.6 ounces, or 413 grams, which is a bit less than the PlayBook’s own weight.

On the other hand, the Nook Tablet keeps the exact same dimensions like its predecessor, the Nook Color. At 8.1 x 5.0 x 0.48 inches (205 x 127 x 12.2 mm), the Nook is slightly larger than the Kindle on every axe of its dimensions. Regardless, it is still a bit lighter than Amazon’s ereader, at just 14.1 ounces, meaning just under 400 grams.

Hardware specs

CPU

The Amazon Kindle Fire uses a dual-core 1GHz TI OMAP 4 4430 Cortex-A9 processor, the same actually used by the BlackBerry PlayBook, plus the PowerVR SGX540 GPU. The Nook’s processor has also been improved, from the previous 800MHz that the Color had, the new ereader from Barnes & Nobles now has a dual-core 1GHz CPU.

Memory

The Nook Tablet is definitely the winner here with 1GB of RAM memory, which is double the 512MB that the Kindle has. Moreover, the Kindle has just 8GB of internal storage of which only 6GB is ready for user content, meaning approximately 80 apps plus 10 movies or 800 songs or 6,000 books, while the Nook has 16GB and the option to add an extra maximum 32GB with a microSD card.

Display

Both ereaders own 7-inch color displays, very similar in fact. Kindle’s Gorilla Glass screen has 1024×600 resolution at 169 ppi, with 16 million colors, and I’ve got the feeling that there’s no ambient light sensor present here. The Nook on the other hand, has the same resolution, also at 169 ppi and 16 million colors and using the IPS technology. This time around though, B&N like to brag themselves with the VividView technology from the touchscreen, which the Kindle seems to be missing.

Cameras

Surprisingly enough, neither the Kindle Fire nor the Nook Table have any rear or front camera. It would have been a nice touch though.

Connectivity

Unfortunately both tablets are Wi-Fi only, but we can still hope for future versions that could come with 3G support as well. It also seems that neither ereaders have Bluetooth, or any kind of HDMI output. The Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet support Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n at 2.4 GHz, and they both have a type B micro-USB 2.0 port.

Battery

Amazon’s Kindle Fire is supposed to last up to 8 hours of continuous reading or 7.5 hours of video playback, without Wi-Fi, and charging usually lasts 4 hours using the U.S. power adapter. The tablet can also be charged via USB using a computer. Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet is said to last a little more than the Kindle, reaching 11.5 hours for reading and 9 hours for video playback. Charging time is also a bit shorter at only 3 hours with the Power adapter, and the ereader is also rechargeable with the provided USB cable.

Software

Both tablets are running, surprisingly for many, Android 2.3 Gingerbread, or better yet, what is known as a forked version of Google’s operating system. This means that on top of the basic Gingerbread source code, developers have modified and modeled the software for a better fit for these 7-inch tablets.

The Kindle Fire’s interface is organized in the form of bookshelves and this has its ups and downs, as many changes are quite annoying and unnecessary. For instance, an issue that will certainly give headaches to many users is the fact the touchscreen can sometimes be quite sensitive, and any wrong move you’ll make will end up in something else than what you’d actually expect.

Kindle’s interface starts on top with your name, a search bar, buttons for the existing categories and ends up with a shelf of the most used apps or documents in a somewhat Cover Flow-style. The content is organized as follows in six different categories: Newsstand, Books, Music, Video, Docs and Apps.

Long story short, the most important difference in the software system of the two is that the Kindle uses its own proprietary Amazon Silk web browser, while the Nook Tablet uses a slightly modified Android browser. The Silk browser has a special icon right next to the above mentioned categories, and it has the ability to learn your habits and pre-load most used pages.

The Silk browser uses Amazon’s EC2 computer cluster and in order to load pages as fast as possibly it uses the cloud for some rendering operations. This actually lifts some heavy load off the browser making it faster, but it’s far from the first place as the fastest browser yet. Anyways, compared with PlayBook’s browser, the Silk holds on tight, as the two usually end up neck-and-neck in rendering pages.

In the box

If you’re deciding for any of the two tablets here’s what you’ll find at a first glance packed in the box. The Kindle Fire comes with its U.S. power adapter (working at 100-240V) and a Quick Start Guide. Of course you’ll also find the tablet itself down there, don’t panic. The Nook Tablet is accompanied by the power adapter, the quick start guide and the USB cable, which Amazon forgot to mention.

Price and availability

As we’ve mentioned before, the Kindle Fire has been released as of November 15, while the Nook Tablet still awaits its November 18 launch date. Amazon is offering the Kindle at an extraordinary price of just $199, which is less than cheap. As we said, it is believed that Amazon is in fact losing $10 for each Kindle Fire sold, but they’re hoping to recover that by content sold eventually. Barnes & Noble will sell the Nook Tablet for $249, which is the closest to the Kindle that we know of.

BlackBerry PlayBook vs Kindle Fire vs Nook Tablet vs Nook Color

Conclusion: Kindle Fire vs. Nook Tablet

There is no easy choice here, that’s for sure. Each one of these two tablet ereaders has its own advantages and disadvantages. The Kindle is indeed $50 cheaper, but the Nook brings a few aces up its sleeves too. On the other hand, if you’re a big fan of the Android, you might not be as excited as you would like about the Kindle’s Silk browser, and opt for Nook’s Android browser, even slightly modified as it is. We can’t say anything about the speeds of the tablets yet. At least until we can hold both devices in-hands for a face-to-face comparison. On paper though, the Nook seems to be just a notch ahead, at least due to its 1GB RAM. Ultimately, the two are more alike than you’d expect. It will be a matter of tastes after all.