New Nook 7 Android Tablet Costs $50, Ships on Black Friday
That 7" Nook tablet which showed up on the FCC website a few weeks back is now official.
Barnes & Noble just announced the Nook Tablet 7 (sounds like a supervillain team, doesn't it), its cheapest Android tablet yet.
This $50 wonder is a rebranded Chinese tablet running Android 6.0 Marshmallow on a 1.3GHz MediaTek CPU. It comes with Google Play and runs the Nook apps on top of a stock Android install, just like the FCC paperwork lead us to expect.
It has 8GB storage, a microSD card slot, and the usual Wifi and Bluetooth.
Its 7" screen has a resolution of 600 x 1024. That is rather low, even for $50 tablets, but the tablet makes up for it with the cameras. It has both front and rear cameras with resolutions of 2MP and 5MP, respectively.
Weighing in at 8.8 ounces, the Nook Tablet 7 promises a battery good for 'up to 7 hours of reading, web browsing, and video watching". (The FCC paperwork showed a 3Ah battery, but there's no mention of that spec on the product listing.)
All in all that's not a bad spec list, but of course the real question is the quality of the software, the constriction, and the cameras.
As we have seen with the $50 Fire tablet, it is possible to make a decent tablet at that price.
But can B&n pull it off? That is another matter.
If anyone can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory … it is B&N! 🙂
I myself am impressed by their deck chair shuffling skills.
Basically the exact same specs as the $50 2015 Fire, except that it’s using the 2016 Fire HD 8’s CPU. Impressive that they were able to match the Fire’s $50 price. I wonder if they’re actually losing money on it, or if they’ll be prepared to try to follow through with a push to sell more media for it?
I don’t see anything about accessibility features such as text-to-speech either.
The Nook Android app, which is presumably what will be on this tablet, has read-aloud capability.
This “Nook Tablet 7” will be the seventh Nook tablet. It is nice there is not a skin over Android, just some Nook apps added to it. I don’t like the skins most companies apply over Android.
Well, there will probably be a custom launcher, which I’d kind of like a “skin over Android.” But it should be easy to replace.
Saw it yesterday at the B&N in Tyson’s Corner VA. The display model seemed to run smoothly and came with the Google Playstore. If I’m remembering correctly it was running Android 6. The screen looked acceptable though I couldn’t check it with a book.