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.
Barnes and Noble also reduced the price of the Nook Color from $199 to $169 because they certainly can’t sell it for the same price as the new Nook Tablet. But I don’t think $169 is good enough; there’s no reason whatsoever not to spend an extra $30 to get the 8GB Nook Tablet. In fact, it’s surprising that B&N still sells the Nook Color at all; I thought they would have discontinued it by now with the Nook Tablet set to take its place.
It will be interesting to see how this new $199 Nook Tablet plays out. I don’t think it was the price that was hurting Nook Tablet sales so much as Barnes and Noble’s insistence on keeping it locked down to the B&N Nook store. Everything went downhill after B&N closed off the ability to sideload apps from outside the Nook store, especially when the Kindle Fire allows this.
You wouldn’t believe how many people I hear saying they would never buy a Nook because it is too restricted and walled-in to Barnes and Noble. That’s what everyone used to say about Amazon and the Kindle.
But no matter how hard B&N tries to keep the Nook Tablet locked down, they can’t keep developers locked down. After all, the Nook Tablet can be rooted to install the Android Market and now there’s even a CM7 ROM to install as well. And CM9, Android 4.0, doesn’t look far off.
While Amazon progresses with rumors now of a pending 10″ Kindle Fire, B&N regresses by cutting features on the Nook Tablet. If B&N had made the Nook Tablet more open, like the Kindle Fire, they would be at a very different point today…IMHO.
I don’t understand how the announcement of this new nook proves that the current nooks aren’t selling well. All it seems to prove- is that there’s a new nook. Anything else is pure speculation. I think it’s a little scary to publish opinions as though they’re facts. Granted this site is not The New York Times or anything, but it gives me pause to see someone announce something as concrete based on nothing but their own opinions. There’s zero proof of how well the nook has sold and until B&N releases sales figures- anything else is just a guess.
Also, anyone who even knows what sideloading is, will be savvy enough to that ability to sideload has been restored via a loophole in the 1.4 firmware.
It seems like you have a real bias against the nook and I’m not quite sure why. It’s a product. Some want it, some don’t. It’s one thing to prefer a competing product, but to actively hate a product seems a little shortsighted.
You are way off the mark, Jimmy. I don’t hate the Nook Tablet at all; I’m rooting for B&N. More competition is always better. Perhaps you didn’t click through to the earlier article where I outlined three signs that show the Nook Tablet clearly appears to be selling a lot less than the Kindle Fire. If the Nook Tablet is selling so great at $249 then what’s the point of releasing one that just happens to be the exact same price as the Kindle Fire.
Nathan keep up the good work. Your reviews and comparisons are excellent. When companies do not release sales figures, we all have to guess. Your blog is very objective, that is why I keep reading it.
I agree with Nathan’s view. If B&N wanted to try and make a price point statement, then they should have just dropped the price of the Nook Tablet to $199 and leave the memory configuration the way it is. The $50 price difference is not great and if you could side load the Nook Tablet then it would be a good value.
It does not look like a price point issue to me, but more one of standards and allowing the customer to do with the device what they want.
Who knows, I’ll bet B&N could probably learn some very valuable things from their customers that might actually allow them to get a leg up on the Kindle Fire.
It’s a real bummer if the B&N’s tablet is doing poorly. They really had something going with their larger internal storage and external SD card usage. But locking the device down is definitely a “don’t buy” point in my book. Which is sad for me because the nook line was my previous favourite and I’m not a fan of cloud storage on a portable device. I can’t use that cloud storage on car-trip or a train or the metro when I might need it.
Looks like I’ll just have to buy a ‘real’ tablet when I decide I want one…
Nathan, the problem is, while your last article uses the word “appears,” this current one makes it sound a bit more concrete. I cite the following sentences: “Well, it looks like I was right. The Nook Tablet isn’t selling well.” That doesn’t sound like speculation- that sounds like fact. I don’t mean to stir up trouble or anything here. I just thought you should know that your post sounds more like gloating than reporting.
Actually I agree. That sentence got edited to work in the link and it doesn’t come across they way I intended. I just updated it to change it back the way it was supposed to be, which is the other article’s title.
“You wouldn’t believe how many people I hear saying they would never buy a Nook because it is too restricted and walled-in to Barnes and Noble. That’s what everyone used to say about Amazon and the Kindle.”
It’s why I wouldn’t pay for either a Nook Color/Tablet OR a Kindle at this point. BN almost had me until they limited personal space to 1GB. After that, forget it.
IMO, the Fire outselling the Nook has little to do with B&N’s unfortunate decision to lock it down. Amazon has a ton of marketing advantages over B&N: A direct sales site with 15-20x the traffic plus an even bigger web reach with it’s affiliate program, the established Kindle brand/reputation, an Apple-like amount of free publicity/press coverage at launch.
But I think Amazon’s biggest advantage is it’s content eco-system. For tech head it may not be that big a deal, but I think a lot of mainstream buyers want something hassle-free and that includes music, tv and movies. Amazon’s offerings may be lacking, but that’s better than B&N’s goose egg.
I am simplly amazed at B&N emascuating this device. The device has wonderful capabilities such as a microphone and blue tooth. The microphone can only be used with appropriate childrens books and the blue tooth isn’t activated to take advantage of devices such as wireless keyboards that could utilize the available MS Office program available for this device.
It appears the owner must resort to hacking the device to begin to use its full potential. Insanity.
I may have missed it but I haven’t seen you mention this yet. One of the things about the 16gb Nook people complained about was how only 1gb of that was reserved for user content.
You have to take it into a B&N store but apparently now their Nooksellers can/will change the memory partition so 8gb can be used for user content (5.5gb for B&N). Cnet mentions it here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57397505-1/b-n-begins-in-store-nook-tablet-memory-reallocation-program/ & a B&N sales rep I spoke to told me the same thing the other day.