The Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, which will retail for $249 and arrive in stores at the end of next week, looks very similar to the Nook Color -- which Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch says is the second-best selling tablet behind the iPad.
That device's price will be reduced from $249 to $199 starting today. The Nook Simple Touch's price will be reduced from $139 to $99.
The Nook Tablet runs on Wi-Fi, and it has a 7-inch display, a built-in microphone, web browsing, email, the ability to play movies in HD and a "Nook Newstand" that allows users to subscribe to periodicals. Barnes & Noble's new tablet comes with 16 GB of memory, twice that of the Kindle Fire, and enables users to add up to 32 GB more using an SD card.
For content beyond reading material, Barnes & Noble has preloaded Netflix and Hulu Plus on its new device. Like the Kindle Fire, the tablet runs Android 2.3 but does not allow access to the full Android market -- only selected and Nook-optimized apps. By the holidays, it hopes to offer Nook-specific apps from third-party developers.
Lynch minced no words in positioning the tablet against the Kindle Fire.
He called the tablet "a vending machine for Amazon's services" and criticized Amazon for selling an ad-supported version of the Kindle Fire at a $40 discount. Brick-and-mortar stores that can provide support, more memory and a device that is slightly lighter were all included in his list of reasons that the Nook Tablet had an advantage over the Kindle Fire.
Lynch also said that Netflix CEO Reed Hasting said that HD movies look better on the Nook.
"Judge for yourself," he said, "but we think content will look and render better on the Nook than on Kindle Fire."