New Nook 7 Android Tablet Costs $50, Ships on Black Friday

Posted on 16 November, 2016 by Nate Hoffelder in Barnes & Noble, e-Reading Hardware // 60 Comments

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.

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About Nate Hoffelder (9906 Articles)

Nate Hoffelder is the founder and editor of The Digital Reader:"I've been into reading ebooks since forever, but I only got my first ereader in July 2007. Everything quickly spiraled out of control from there. Before I started this blog in January 2010 I covered ebooks, ebook readers, and digital publishing for about 2 years as a part of MobileRead Forums. It's a great community, and being a member is a joy. But I thought I could make something out of how I covered the news for MobileRead, so I started this blog."

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8 Comments on New Nook 7 Android Tablet Costs $50, Ships on Black Friday

Michael Anderson // 16 November, 2016 at 12:39 pm // Reply
If anyone can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory … it is B&N! 🙂
- Nate Hoffelder // 16 November, 2016 at 1:06 pm // Reply
  I myself am impressed by their deck chair shuffling skills.
Chris Meadows // 16 November, 2016 at 1:42 pm // Reply
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?
MKS // 16 November, 2016 at 4:23 pm // Reply
I don’t see anything about accessibility features such as text-to-speech either.
- Chris Meadows // 16 November, 2016 at 8:16 pm // Reply
  The Nook Android app, which is presumably what will be on this tablet, has read-aloud capability.
Frank // 17 November, 2016 at 9:49 am // Reply
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.
- Chris Meadows // 17 November, 2016 at 11:35 am // Reply
  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.
KLG // 17 November, 2016 at 8:25 pm // Reply
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.