Barnes & Noble’s Nookcolor Further Blurs Tablet, E-Reader Lines
With tablet PCs and e-readers among the top five gifts expected to ring through cash registers this holiday season, it’s not clear where Barnes & Noble’s $249 Nookcolor e-reader will fall in the mix between sub-$200 e-readers currently on the market and the low-end tablet PCs starting to roll out. Certain to take a hit is Barnes & Noble’s own $149 Wi-Fi Nook and its $199 3G counterpart, which use an E-Ink display, said analyst Ross Rubin of NPD Research. Although the Nookcolor “seems like a stronger competitor to the Kindle” than the original Nook, Rubin said, the “considerable price delta” could limit appeal of the Nookcolor to all but “those hard-core e-reader customers looking for a bit more multimedia capability,” he said.
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The Nookcolor, due to reach Barnes & Noble stores, Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Books-A-Million Nov. 19, takes the e-reader to the next level by adding an LG-supplied 7-inch touch-screen said to use the same AH-IPS screen as the iPad. A spokesman for LG Display said the Nook’s 7-inch AH-IPS display is built at LG’s Gumi, South Korea, LCD plant and that the technology boasts a wide field of view and fast response speed. The Nookcolor will support Web-browsing via the Android platform along with video playback, Barnes & Noble said. Built in is 8 GB of internal memory that could accommodate a combination of media including 1,000 books, 25 color magazines, 10 newspapers, 50 kids’ books, 500 songs and 150 photos, the company said. Storage is expandable via microSD card, it said.
Also in the 10-inch-and-under display-based device segment, Creative announced two Android-based “entertainment tablets” in 7-inch and 10-inch sizes, raising the question of how many portable screen-based devices consumers will be willing to buy. The music and video-oriented Creative ZiiO, dubbed the world’s first “apt-X enabled” touch-screen tablet, supports the Kindle e-book app, a company spokeswoman told us, and allows users to check e-mail, watch movies, play games and download applications from the Internet and Creative’s Zii Store. The apt-X codec allows users to stream hi-fi stereo via Bluetooth to compatible speakers and headphones, the company said. Availability is December with suggested retail prices of $249-$319 depending on size and storage.
Rubin of NPD says Web-browsing e-readers could “cannibalize” sales of some of the small-screen portable devices including digital picture frames, portable DVD players and even some in-vehicle entertainment systems, “because you don’t need them installed.” As more-robust products come out, low-end Android tablets with Web browsers and video players in the $150 range could be affected, if they have “slow processors, resistive screens and don’t deliver the iPad experience,” he said.
According to Insight Media, tablet PC sales will reach 94 million units by 2015 and general-purpose e-book readers will hit 26 million units. A report by the firm covered general-purpose e-books, e-newspapers, e-textbooks, e-professional reference books and tablets. The report concluded that the tablet is a more general-purpose product that will serve the needs of multimedia users and will “cannibalize sales of netbook products as well as upgrades from smart phones."
Citing the thin line between e-readers and tablets, the report’s authors concluded it’s “not clear today if consumers really see the tablet primarily as a reading device or if other use modes are more important.” The near future of the tablet is “crucial for the further development of this category,” they said, as the focus shifts from the early adopter to mainstream customers. They said an emerging trend is that casual book and document readers will be “happy with a tablet while power users will prefer a dedicated product.”