In a post-Fire world, even the smallest differences can push the average consumer into a decision between Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble’s NOOK Tablet. One of the main advantages the NOOK Tablet had over the Kindle Fire had been twice the storage space (16 GB vs. 8GB) as well as twice the RAM (1 GB vs. 512 MB). Of course, this upgrade also came with a $50 premium over the Fire. However, it seems Barnes & Noble has limited this relatively expansive storage to only 1 GB of non-B&N-related media, such as side-loaded music, videos, and pictures.
Can't you see them seething with hatred for each other?
Now, this issue isn’t as large of a problem as it would be with the Kindle Fire, as the NOOK Tablet has a handy dandy microSD card slot to satiate your need for excessive episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and How I Met Your Mother, as well as Lady Gaga’s latest album. However, this still does pose a problem for the average, non-tech savvy user. He’ll wonder why he can’t put his entire iTunes library onto his NOOK Tablet, get frustrated, and possibly even return the “reader tablet.”
And while Barnes & Noble has said the rest of the internal storage will be accessible in a future update to 3rd party multimedia applications on the NOOK Tablet, in this cutthroat sub-$300 tablet world, compromises like that won’t cut it. The Kindle Fire already has a larger streaming library of movies and thousands of free books with Amazon Prime, as well a great music store that Barnes & Noble just can’t compete with. Even with B&N’s collection of brick-and-mortar stores, Amazon just seems to have the upper hand in price and multimedia breadth. So while something as small as limiting user storage may seem like an insignificant issue, it may push the average consumer into the Amazon corner of the tablet marketplace; something Barnes & Noble definitely doesn’t want.
Comments are closed.