Barnes & Noble has announced the Nook Tablet 7, a new tablet aimed to compete with Amazon’s $50 Fire Tablet released last year, on Friday, November 25th. The tablet will run Android, but be customized with Nook software.
The Nook Tablet 7 will feature a 7″ 1024×600 pixel display, 8GB of storage with a microSD card slot that will allow for expansion up to 128GB, a quad-core processor, front and rear facing cameras, and dual-band WiFi. Barnes & Noble says the battery should last 7 hours on a charge while reading, web browsing, and watching cat videos online. It will run Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box, and come with Google Play support, something that Amazon’s offering lacks.
Barnes & Nobles’ collection of apps to access books, magazines, and more will be preloaded. The Nook app store, which was discontinued earlier this year, will be missing from the tablet, but replaced by the Google Play Store, giving users access to the largest collection of Android applications available.
The new tablet has similar specs and is priced to compete with Amazon’s offering, which will likely end up helping Amazon to improve too. Either tablet would make an excellent holiday gift, but Barnes & Nobles’ timing couldn’t be more perfect for a holiday release. The Nook Tablet 7 is available for preorder now, with preorder deliveries expected as early as next week. It will go on sale in stores on Black Friday, November 25th.