The Amazon Kindle’s greatest rivals, the Barnes & Noble’s Nook HD and Nook HD+, have today officially gone on sale across the UK for the first time, offering up major competition to Amazon’s Kindle range of tablets as well as to Google and Apple.
The Barnes & Noble Nook tablets will be landing on shelves in major retail stores such as Argos, Asda, Blackwells,Foyles, Dixons, John Lewis, Sainsburys, Waitrose and online at www.nook.co.uk, and they will be competitively priced with Amazon’s Kindle Fire and the Apple iPad Mini.
Barnes & Noble, the US bookstore giant, announced the two new Android-based tablets to replace its successful NOOK tablets back in September and today’s release will see the first time that the Nook tablets have reached our UK shores. The two new slates are the Nook HD and the Nook HD+, and represent two different sizes of Android-based tablets.
The Nook HD has a 7-inch 243 pixels-per-inch screen with a 1.3GHz dual-core processor, which beats the Apple iPad Mini with its 163ppi display. The 8GB version of the Nook HD will come in at £159 which brings it in at the same price as the Google Nexus 7 16GB and the same with the 16GB version of the Kindle Fire HD. The Nook HD is a whopping £110 cheaper than the 16GB version of the iPad Mini which is priced at £269. There will also be a Nook HD 16GB version available for £189.
Barnes & Noble has claimed that its Nook HD’s processor is “smoother and faster” than the Kindle Fire HD and states that the graphics processing is 80 per cent faster too.
B&N uses Android as a base for the software but adds its own look, feel and services. The Nook HD+ will allow up to 5 users to be added, with options to switch accounts easily to view your own personal content – it’s got a very family orientated feel to it. You’ll also have access to cloud storage, apps and books courtesy of both Google and Barnes & Noble.
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