When tablets became the next big thing in 2010, every tech company jumped into the fray hoping to monopolize on the trend. There are definitely lessons to be learned from the dirt cheap Android tablets, Fusion Garage’s JooJoo, and the like—notably, how companies quickly stopped supporting them. However, some tablets, like the Nook Tablet, get reprieve thanks to CyanogenMod.
It looks like Barnes & Noble plans to release a new 8GB model of its Nook Tablet that is only available in a 16 GB version for $249. The proof comes from documentation acquired by The Verge, and as the publication pointed out, it is pretty much safe to assume the new 8GB Nook Tab will come in closer to the price tag of its biggest competitor the Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire. At the launch of the Nook Tablet, B&N CEO William Lynch claimed the Kindle Fire is “deficient for a media tablet” due to its 8GB of storage (6GB available for user content). According to the document, the 8GB Nook Tablet will be landing in Walmart this Wednesday, Feb. 22.
Plex, the very popular streaming media application, is on its way to the Nook Color and Nook Tablet’s Store, reports GigaOm. For those unfamiliar with Plex, it is a popular application available on iOS and Android that lets users manage their home’s media content through a custom server.
Plex’s wide variety of supported media formats, available plug-ins, and the Windows and Mac application make it arguably the best solution for controlling media across the household. The Barnes and Noble review team approved Plex, so it should see its way onto the Nook Store in the coming days.
The Nook’s Plex app will be very close to the Android app, but it will have an added layer of approval process for software titles, GigaOm reports.
The Nook Color and Nook Tablet’s popular competitor, the Kindle Fire, also has Plex. The addition of Plex to the Nook Store will give customers the ability to better manage their media — something that customers love to do with their cheaper tablets.
When Barnes & Noble unveiled the new Android-powered Nook Tablet, it was clear it would be a Kindle Fire competitor and not necessarily compete in the broader tablet market. Well we already learned earlier this month that Amazon is set to ship around four million units by the end of 2011, but despite that the Nook Tablet is also posting strong numbers with DigiTimes reporting the company has shipped a million units since launch.
Barnes & Noble should have so far taken delivery of one million units of Nook Tablet PCs from OEM production partners… The market had originally expected Barnes & Noble to pull in orders for 800,000 Nook Tablet PCs before year-end 2011, indicated the sources, adding that the increased orders from Barnes & Noble has strengthened Inventec’s position in the OEM tablet PC segment.
At the beginning of December, research firm IHS iSuppli expected Amazon to take estimated 13.8 perfect share of the global tablet market. At that time, the report had Barnes & Noble at 4.7 percent of the market in comparison to Amazon’s 13.8%. These numbers were of course before we learned the Kindle Fire’s initial shipment numbers today. DigiTimes contributes the increased shipments due to strong sales of the Kindle Fire during the Thanksgiving shopping holiday and in anticipation of the upcoming Christmas holidays. Barnes & Noble could potentially begin to close the gap depending on how it performs against the Kindle Fire in the coming weeks.
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