Barnes & Noble does the inevitable, launches $199 Nook Tablet and drops the Nook Color’s price
Posted on 21. Feb, 2012 by TabletMan in Tablets
Today, Barnes & Noble launched a tablet that everyone saw coming. The $199 8GB Nook Tablet was made available for purchase today for the first time on the Barnes & Noble website and select retail locations. The new tablet is really just the Nook Tablet from late 2011 that’s been selling for $249, but with 8GB of storage instead of 16GB and half the RAM at 512MB. The physical appearance of the 8GB Nook Tablet doesn’t differ at all from the 16GB model that is about two months older than it.
In addition to announcing the $199 Nook Tablet Barnes & Noble also revealed a new price for the companies 7-inch Nook Color eReader turned tablet. The Nook Color had been priced at $199 ever since the Nook Tablet was introduced, but now the single-core touch tablet is just $169.
Here are the main features for the 8GB Nook Tablet:
- Movies, TV shows & music from Netflix, Hulu Plus™, Pandora® & more
- Lightning fast web-browsing, email & smooth streaming video
- Over 2.5 million books, magazines, comics & kids’ books
- Thousands of must-have apps like Angry Birds & Words With Friends
- World’s most advanced VividView™ 7″ Touchscreen
- Extra-long battery life — 11.5 hrs of reading or 9 hrs of video
- 512MB RAM
- Expandable memory- add up to 32 GB w/ microSD™ card
- Always free in-store support
- Storage details – 8GB advertised, 4GB is all that is available to you for adding your own outside content, 1GB is reserved for NOOK Store content, and the rest for the operating system and necessary system files.
They probably should have done this last year
Barnes & Noble launched their Nook Tablet just before the Amazon Kindle Fire was released in an attempt to capture the hearts and minds of low-cost tablet buyers during the 2011 holiday shopping rush before Amazon could get to them. However iSuppli’s Q4 2011 estimates are accurate Amazon sold more than double the tablets that Barnes & Noble did during the closing part of 2011 (remember both companies officially entered the tablet market in Q4 of 2011).
There are a few possibilities as to why more consumers chose to pick-up the Kindle Fire over the Nook Tablet, but the main reason would probably be the price difference. The Kindle Fire was and still is sold in only one configuration, a 8GB Wi-Fi only model that is $199.99. On the other hand the Nook Tablet was sold, until today, in only one configuration that included 16GB of storage and Wi-Fi only Internet access for $249.99 –a difference of $50 from the Kindle Fire.
When Barnes & Noble launched their Nook Tablet they missed an opportunity to launch a $199 model. The company instead chose to recycle the aging Nook Color and sell it as their $199 tablet device. That was a mistake in my opinion. If you consider that prior to launching the Nook Tablet Barnes & Noble and the rest of the world had already been told by Amazon that their new tablet would only cost consumers $199 when it was launched, there was no real surprise when Amazon launched the $199 Kindle Fire just a few short days after Barnes & Noble launched their $249 Nook Tablet.
Going ahead this could be a winning strategy
Even though the Nook Color and the two Nook Tablets don’t look very different from one another the three tablets are different devices. The Nook Color is a bare-bones tablet that has a really high quality screen for the money, the new 8GB Nook Tablet is a low-cost dual-core Android tablet, and the 16GB Nook Tablet is a better low-cost dual-core Android tablet.
Having a group of tablets at different price points with different features is important and in the future it will be even more important. Right now variety is something that Barnes & Noble has that Amazon doesn’t in respect to tablets. Down the road that could help Barnes & Noble sell more tablets that Amazon if B&N can figure out a way to market their major advantage well enough for consumers.
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