As leaked earlier, Barnes & Noble introduced a 7-inch color tablet/eReader, beating rival Amazon to market with color and touchscreen capability in a full sized eReading screen.
The new NOOKcolor will be available November 19 at $249 and may be pre-ordered online Wednesday at www.NOOKcolor.com. It will head to Best Buy, Walmart and Books-A-Million starting late November.
It offers WiFi access to about 2 million eBook titles on an Android platform. And it claims it’s the first eReading device to offer periodicals in full color. Barnes & Noble has also added what it calls the largest eBookstore for kids–NOOK Kids–including some titles permitting interaction with words and pictures. Some titles may also auto “read aloud” as text-to-speech.
The NOOKcolor has 8GB of space (expandable) for eBooks and it includes an eBook lending feature.
In most tablets, when an E Ink monochrome screen is replaced by a color screen as in the NOOKcolor, the device is no longer readable in direct sunlight and it gets short on battery life. B&N said its new screen reduces glare, but apparently full production samples weren’t available at it press conference Tuesday, so reporters couldn’t run outside for a test.
The NOOKcolor also comes with some game apps, Pandora, a digital music player and it permits full web browsing.
You can view PDF and ePub files as well as other standard files such as JPG, PND, GIF and BMP. You can also view Microsoft Office files with Quickoffice software.
Also, current NOOK eReaders (with E Ink screens) will receive an upgrade in November providing faster page turns and improved search.
Source: Barnes & Noble
