The second iteration of the Nook Color line of e-readers has been leaked and will officially be known as the Nook Tablet. It is a mirror image of the first generation Nook Color but all of the hidden wonders are on the software side and underneath the hood.
The Nook Tablet is a 7 inch device with the same capacitive multitouch screen. There will be a strong boost to the performance via the Texas Instruments OMAP4 1.2 GHZ dual core processor. The original Nook Color only had 8 GB of internal memory but the new Nook Tablet has 16 GB! It will also maintain the MicroSD card functionality and can be boosted further by 32 GB. This will allow more media to be stored on the expandable memory and even give you the option to root it. One aspect people will love is the fact the RAM is doubled! Most e-readers or tablets these day are shipped with 512 MB, the Nook Tablet got upgraded to a solid 1 GB of RAM.
The Nook Tablet will be thinner and lighter then the original which should be a boon to most users. It is thinned by 0.02 inches and lighter by .9 ounces.
On the software side of things it will still be running the Android 2.3 OS out of the gates with support for Ice Cream Sandwich down the road. New apps will be installed right out of the box including; Hulu Plus and Pandora. It will also support Flash, Youtube Videos and the popular B&N Android App store.
The eBooks experience seems to be maintained with support for books you load in yourself. EPUB, PDF, XLS, DOC, PPT, TXT, DOCM, XLM, PPTM, PPSM, DOCX, XLX, PPTX! Lots of multimedia support is evident with MP4, Adobe Flash, JPG, PNG, BMP, MP3, MP4 and AAC.
The Nook Color this weekend will experience a massive price drop to $199 at Walmart, Barnes and Noble and other stores. This is to make way for the official announcement Monday for the Nook Tablet. It will debut for $249 and be available in the stores next week. Most stores already have them in the back and are training the staff on the new device.
This might give serious competition to the Kindle Fire because both of them have dual core processors and tap into massive ecosystems. Both devices will be functional mainly for the USA audience but the Nook Color might have better viability for international customers.
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Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
