Android Tablet: Nook Tablet Apps

Friday 19 October 2012

Nook Tablet Apps

With barely a thousand apps on board, Barnes & Noble's app store is puny compared to the Amazon Appstore, which launched in March with 3,800 apps on board. But of the slim pickings in the Nook app store most are useful, high-quality ones that show off the new Nook Tablet's ($249) and Nook Color's gorgeous high-resolution, 7-inch LCD multi-touch display.

The Nook Tablet, like the Amazon Kindle Fire, runs a very highly customized version of Android 2.3 on a TI OMAP4, 1GHz dual-core processor, making it difficult to interchange apps between the two tablets without rooting them first. Furthermore the Nook's user interface looks nothing like Amazon's (or, for that matter, Android's).

Furthermore unlike the Nook Tablet's popular rival, the Amazon Kindle Fire ($199, Editor's Choice), the Nook Tablet partitions 15GB of the 16GB of onboard RAM. In other words, you can only use this space to store content purchased from Barnes & Noble unless you buy an extra 32GB MicroSD card to sideload third-party apps. "Most of the app store is filled with games or children apps, but Barnes & Noble has said it will ramp up options in fashion, cooking, travel, and health over the next few months.