Three days ago, Barnes and Noble let loose an extra-mysterious missive to the general public.
Many are speculating this is the highly anticipated Nook Color 2 announcement. From everything that’s going on, it seems a safe bet. It could, of course, be something completely different, but I’m going to keep my fingers crossed for a brand new Nook Color tablet.
However, for it to compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire, it needs to do a few things.
For one, it needs to be reasonably priced. At 199$, the Kindle Fire is hard to beat for what you’re getting. 8 gigs of onboard storage, Android marketplace, 7 inch screen, access to Amazon’s cloud computing services, dual core processor. It’s pretty sweet. However, it doesn’t have external storage. The Kindle Fire has no USB port or SD slot for all the extra things you want to download. In this day and age 8 GBs just isn’t much. Between Kevin and I, that’s our entire music library combined. It’s actually probably more than 8GBs.
Add to that the Kindle Fire is being touted as a tablet perfect for watching movies and you’ve got a problem. 8 GBs is what? 8 movies top? Not a lot of space there folks, and lets get down to the real nitty gritty. It says 8 GBs, but it’s actually only 6 available gigs. So it’s great for storing a few thousand ebooks, and a few hundred songs, but what happens when you start downloading pictures, more music, apps, etc? Cloud storage, right? What happens if you don’t have wifi access at that moment?
Exactly.
So the Nook will probably have an external storage port of some sort, so bonus there. It needs to be priced around 200$ to compete with the Fire. It also needs to have a dual core processor. The Kindle Fire will run with Android 2.3, so the new Nook Color 2, should have 2.3 or better. If they really want to one up Amazon, it should have Honeycomb, 3.0. Considering I’m already looking at the Archos 80 G9 for about 300$, I would buy the Nook Color 2 if it’s similarly priced to the Archos, but that’s not everyon, obviously. I will be checking on their announcement Monday to see what all the hub bub is about and report back.
