At one time, Amazon and Barnes & Noble were heated rivals, each trying to outdo the other with new product releases. However, over the fall of 2011, Amazon certainly saw considerable success with their new tablet, the Amazon Kindle Fire.
Putting aside the iPad which Apple says caters to another group of tablet users, the Kindle Fire had very little competition in its price range. B&N saw this and there was very little that it could do but sit ideally by. However, behind the scenes, it was known that B&N was going to address this issue by developing a low cost tablet of their own and it would appear that the time for additional competition in this niche is drawing closer.
According to the reports, B&N is getting ready to launch a cheaper, lower storage version of their Nook Color. Walmart will be one of the first box stores to receive the new tablets and a recent leak shows that these devices will go on sale in two days time, February 22nd at 12:01 AM. The device will be an 8GB model and the expectation is that the company is looking to establish a price point that will either be the same or lower then the Amazon Kindle Fire. The 8GB Nook Tablet should do a lot for the company to compete with the Kindle Fire and there is also the possibility that it may have an advantage over the competition. Assuming that B&N retains the option of expanding the on-board storage of the device through an SD card, customers will have the ability to bump up the storage to 16GB. This feature is something that we see on the 16GB Nook Tablet, but is absent from the Kindle Fire.
