How to Use Kindle Fire as a Drawing Tablet

Nook Tablet detailed: Kindle Fire is in trouble

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Moments ago, Barnes & Noble announced the new Nook Tablet, and price drops for the Nook Color (now $199), and the Nook Simple touch ($99). The Nook Tablet, priced at $249, is available for pre-order now, and it will be on the shelves of all major big box retailers by the end of next week (around November 16). Updated: Photos of the Tablet are available at the end of the story.

Beyond an impressive deck of slides, B&N CEO William Lynch spent a good portion of the announcement bashing the Kindle Fire, which is released a day before the Tablet on November 15. The Kindle Fire might be cheaper ($200), but Lynch assures us that the Nook Tablet is a far better device. The screens are both 1024×600 IPS LCDs, but the Tablet is "laminated" to (somehow) make it better (less glare, perhaps). The devices are physically almost identical, but the Tablet is slightly lighter. The Tablet has 16GB of internal storage compared to the Fire's 8GB — and the Tablet has a microSD slot. The Tablet has twice the RAM, too, though we're not sure what impact that will actually have while watching movies.

And therein lies the crux: B&N might be pitching the Tablet against the Fire — and desperately trying to ameliorate that $50 price difference at the same time — but the new tablets are more dissimilar than you might think. Lynch really hammered home the fact that the Fire's 8GB of internal storage isn't enough space for HD video — but since when do you need internal storage for Amazon's streaming TV, movie, and music content? Lynch was at pains to point out that the Nook Tablet can play 1080p video for nine hours — but he fails to point out that the Kindle Fire is built on the exact same dual-core, 1GHz OMAP4 SoC, and has the same 1080p hardware decoder (and both devices have less-than-720p screens anyway!) The Tablet might have a slightly better battery, but we're talking about a 30 or 60 minute difference, no more.

Basically, as always, Amazon has gone the highly-integrated route. As a result, it can offload lots of processing (Amazon Silk) and storage (streaming multimedia) to the cloud. B&N, as it doesn't have the same infrastructure, has produced a very reasonably priced 7-inch iPad competitor. The Tablet does have the advantage on some content species — magazines and comics, most notably — but that's an edge that Amazon will surely wear down now that it finally has a full-color LCD device on the market. It seems like the consumer has two quite distinct options: a device that has first-class access to Amazon's horn of plenty, or a high-quality, high-spec media slate from B&N.

Almost the entirety of B&N's presentation hinged on the Tablet's hardware specification, but the tablet and e-book reader war isn't about specs: It's about the experience, it's about the software. Having said that, though, we should remember that the Nook Color is the second most successful tablet after the iPad. Amazon is the newbie in this particular spat, and for all we know the Fire might be as usable as a rusty spoon. We'll just have to wait and see — only a week to go!

How to Use Kindle Fire as a Drawing Tablet

Source: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/103795-nook-tablet-detailed-kindle-fire-is-in-trouble

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