A new report indicates that the new Barnes & Noble e-reader, the Nook Tablet, will be priced at $249, the same price as the current Nook Color. It also suggests that the price on the Nook Color will be reduced to $199.
The report comes from the folks at Engadget and appears to be well sourced. According to them, the new tablet will look just like the 7 inch Nook Color – but will double the amount of memory to 1GB, and double the storage to 16 GB. It will also feature a 32GB expandable SD card.
Barnes & Noble appears to be setting up a two-pronged attack to compete with Amazon’s new Kindle Fire.
The first part will be offering their new Nook Tablet as a more powerful ereader tablet. Like the Nook Color, the Amazon fire has 512 MB of memory, and 8 GB of storage. While the Nook Tablet will cost $50 more than the Kindle Fire, it will have double the memory and storage, and a slightly faster processor.
The second part will be dropping the price of the Nook Color, which has the same memory and storage capacity as the Kindle Fire, to match the price of the Kindle Fire, $199.
Amazon’s advantage in this e-reader tablet battle is their membership program, Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime began as a free shipping membership program but has since expanded into providing free content on many levels. The $79 annual membership allows the user to access thousands of movies, TV shows, and now the Kindle Lending Library. The Kindle Fire is practically designed for accessing this and other content on the Amazon.
Barnes and Nobles is having a press conference on Monday, November 7, in which they are expected to introduce their new tablet. If, along with the new tablet, Barnes & Noble introduces some kind of product or service to compete, at least in some small way, with Amazon Prime (or even just the Kindle Lending Library), that would really cause some excitement.