Well, it looks like I was right. The Nook Tablet isn’t selling as well as the Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble just proved it today by introducing a new Nook Tablet, one with half the memory and RAM as the original, which helped them bring the price down to $199, the same price as the Kindle Fire.

The new Nook Tablet is already available for immediate shipping from B&N.com. It is exactly the same as the original Nook Tablet, which is still $249, but it has 8GB of storage instead of 16GB and has 512MB of RAM instead of 1GB.

Filed under: Nook, Sales and Discounts | Tags: nook tablet | 9 Comments »

CM7 is free open source aftermarket software for Android-powered devices that is based on Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread. It provides for a more customizable and open alternative to the stock interface of the Nook Tablet that is locked into Barnes and Noble and cutoff from its true Android roots.

The video review below will give you a look at CM7 on the Nook Tablet and what features it offers, and then the tutorial will guide you through the entire process of setting up CM7 on your Nook Tablet from beginning to end.

Filed under: How To, Nook, Reviews | Tags: cm7, nook tablet | 5 Comments »

Barnes and Noble hasn’t released any actual sales figures for the Nook Tablet, and neither has Amazon for the Kindle Fire, but if you look closely at some of the signs it becomes clear that the Nook Tablet isn’t selling nearly as well as the Kindle Fire.

Since I don’t have access to any hard proof, I’ll show you the evidence that suggests Nook Tablet sales aren’t very good. Here are three things to consider…

Filed under: Amazon Kindle, Nook | Tags: kindle fire, nook tablet | 14 Comments »

The Barnes and Noble Nook Tablet is on sale today only via Barnes and Noble’s eBay store for $199 when you use code CNOOKDEAL during checkout (update: they changed it so you don’t have to enter the code, and it looks like the deal is continuing into Friday). That’s $50 off the regular price of $249. And it is new, not refurbished.

This is the best deal on the Nook Tablet to date; now is the time to pull the trigger if you want one. B&N offered $25 off earlier this month when purchased with a MasterCard, and there’s also the ongoing deal for getting $50 off with a year subscription to People Magazine, but today’s deal is clearly the best.

Filed under: Nook, Sales and Discounts | Tags: nook tablet, nook touch | 9 Comments »

Good news for Nook Tablet owners. A lot of progress is being made on getting custom ROMs up and running on the Nook Tablet ever since devs cracked the Nook Tablet’s locked bootloader.

The devs at XDA have even managed to get CM7 to run on the Nook Tablet, although there are still a few key things that need to be fixed such as Wi-Fi and sleep mode.

Filed under: Nook | Tags: cm7, nook tablet | 11 Comments »

The people behind N2A cards for the Nook Color are offering a sizable reward to the first person who can crack the Nook Tablet’s locked bootloader and provide a bootable microSD card for Android 2.3 or Android 4.0.

N2A cards are a popular aftermarket mod for the Nook Color that turns it into a open Android tablet running CM7 (Android 2.3). All you do is place an N2A microSD in the Nook and everything runs from there, and you can choose to boot the Nook’s stock functionality as well, so it takes no technical work and the Nook Color isn’t changed in anyway so the warranty remains valid.

Filed under: Nook | Tags: nook tablet | 1 Comment »

Below is a step-by-step tutorial that includes a video walkthrough on how to root the Nook Tablet, install the Android Market, block OTA firmware updates, and other goodies—everything you need to turn it into a proper Android tablet not controlled by Barnes and Noble. Plus you can choose to keep the Nook’s regular features too, or remove them altogether, it’s your choice.

When Barnes and Noble first released the Nook Tablet, it came with a convenient loophole that allowed users to download and install apps from outside the Nook appstore, including Amazon’s appstore. But then B&N released a firmware update, version 1.4.1, right before Christmas that closed off this functionality and locked the Nook Tablet down from installing non-B&N apps.

Filed under: How To, Nook | Tags: nook tablet, root | 38 Comments »

Since Barnes and Noble decided to issue a firmware update for the Nook Tablet, version 1.4.1, that disables the ability to install non-B&N apps from 3rd party sources and kills root, here’s how to revert the Nook Tablet back to the original 1.4.0 firmware and block the firmware update from happening.

Unfortunately firmware updates install automatically without giving us an option, so you have to block updates from happening manually. If your Nook Tablet is still on 1.4.0, jump down to the second section for blocking OTA updates. If your Nook Tablet has already updated to 1.4.1 or some future version, here’s how to go back to the original user-friendly 1.4.0.

Filed under: How To, Nook | Tags: nook tablet | 33 Comments »

Barnes and Noble suck. They just issued an update for the Nook Tablet that effectively turns it from a full-blown Android tablet into a glorified color ereader with benefits.

The firmware update, version 1.4.1, closes the Nook Tablet off from installing Android apps from non-B&N sources. So now instead of having tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of apps available to load on the Nook, now users are stuck with only what B&N provides, about 2000 apps, some of which are 2-3 times what they sell for from other appstores.

Filed under: Nook | Tags: firmware update, nook tablet | 28 Comments »

Now is a good time for a Nook Tablet vs Nook Color comparison review since Barnes and Noble issued a firmware update for the Nook Color to add some new features earlier in the week.

Even before the new firmware it was pretty hard to tell the Nook Tablet and Nook Color apart, and now they are practically identical twins from a software standpoint. I bet the average person would have trouble pointing out many differences after 5 minutes of use on each.

Filed under: Nook, Reviews, Tablets | Tags: nook color, nook tablet | 12 Comments »