I spent a couple of hours with a Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet and an Amazon Kindle Fire this weekend, putting them through their paces at our local Best Buy. I’m seriously considering picking one of these up, but I wanted some hands-on time with both before making any decisions. I’m going to admit that I went in with a bias. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Nook, and I’m the type of person who likes to root for the underdog. Let’s face it: I was using an iMac when Apple was trading at $5/share, and I’ve become more and more Linux curious as Apple has seen more success. I think it’s a borderline mental illness. That said, I was expecting to favor the Nook Tablet over Amazon’s offering, but I came out rather surprised.
Specs and an Elephant in the Room
Let’s get the boring part out of the way first: the Nook Tablet has better specifications than the Kindle Fire. It has more memory. It comes with double the storage. It has a microphone (marketed as a way to record yourself reading books to your kids), and you can add an SD card for even more content. The only hardware drawback the Nook tablet sees is the way Barnes & Noble decided to limit space for sideloaded content, but you can get around that with the SD card. The Kindle Fire offers none of these things. The Kindle Fire doesn’t even come with a micro-USB connector to transfer content from your computer to your new tablet. On paper, it’s anemic.
Still, both tablets compare favorably with the iPad 2 in terms of raw processing power. The Kindle Fire’s processor and memory match the iPad 2, and the Nook Tablet actually has double the memory of Apple’s flagship tablet. Theoretically then, both tablets should be able to match the iPad user experience – the gold standard in tablet performance, as far as I’m concerned. I think the biggest disappointment is that neither comes close. It may seem an unkind comparison, but you can’t talk about tablets without bringing the iPad experience into the discussion. If you can’t match the iPad’s performance (and there is no reason these tablets shouldn’t), then you have to differentiate yourself in some other way. Both the Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire do this with price. Where the iPad is at least a $499 purchase, the Fire rings in at $199, and the Nook Tablet is $249. The price points make these tablets much more accessible, and someone might consider these offerings who might otherwise pass on an iPad.
The Hardware Design
I like the look of the Nook better than the Fire. Rumor has it that Amazon used the Blackberry PlayBook as its template for the Fire, and it shows. You know a Nook when you see it. The Fire looks like any generic Android tablet. That said, both felt great in my hands. Both were light enough to hold comfortably for extended periods of time, and they both felt solid. I’d have no concerns about tossing either of these into my laptop bag or a small piece of luggage. Both have soft rubber backs that make gripping the device easy, and both feature bright, vivid displays. In the store, the Nook Tablet seemed to have better viewing angles than the Fire, and colors seemed slightly crisper. In the end, though, they’re both nice devices, and neither feels cheap despite their prices.
The User Experience
When it comes to ease of use, Amazon’s tablet wins hands-down. Both the Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire are running a modified version of Android 2.3. (Why do vendors keep sticking users with old versions of Android, especially a version with no tablet-specific features?) The Fire, however, manages to transcend many of Android’s usability quirks with its heavily modified system. If no one had told me the Fire was running Android, I might have never guessed. It’s far easier on the eyes than any Android device I’ve used to date. The Nook, on the other hand, is definitely Android-based. It may be a customized version of Android, but there’s no question about its pedigree.
The Fire is just easier to use. The only real problem it faces is a lack of a hardware Home button. I kept futilely tapping a phantom button where one would be on other tablets. Fortunately, it does not take much effort to adjust to the software navigation. Visually, everything fits together very nicely, and the operating system skin is very unobtrusive and gets out of the way of content. Keep your reading habits clean, though. The top row of icons represent your most recently viewed items, and there is no customizing or removing items from that list. Scrolling is smooth, and the only real hiccough I ran into was when paging through a children’s book with several color illustrations. Scrolling is smooth and responsive in almost all other cases, and shuffling items on the home screen’s bookshelf was a snap.
The Nook, in contrast, felt twitchy. From swiping between screens to paging through ebooks to moving icons around on the home screen, there always seemed to be a jerkiness to how the system responded. It’s a feeling I’ve grown used to on Android devices, a lack of one-to-one correspondence with your finger’s movements and the screen’s responses to those movements. Compounding this is a lack of intuitiveness in the interface. For instance, I was looking for a way to show photos on the Nook. I couldn’t find one. This despite the fact that the Nook’s product page says it supports a variety of image formats. A sales associate was able to help me out by showing me I should have gone to the Settings screen to find the Home Screen settings where I could choose a new background, and I could browse uploaded photos from there. A familiar feeling of frustration began to creep into my back at this point, and I went back to find photos on the Fire. I did so in one tap.
Both feature great reading software, as they should, but I have to wonder why they both insist on justifying text on such a small screen. It makes for odd word spacing at times. Also, each has a perfectly serviceable onscreen keyboard with which I was able to thumb type with a reasonable degree of accuracy (and the auto-complete suggestions worked well). I wasn’t typing as accurately or as quickly as with the iPad’s keyboard, on which I can type nearly full speed with a great degree of accuracy in landscape mode, but I was not frustrated with the keyboard like I am with the iPod touch.
An Online Note
I couldn’t check out either email client in the setting of a retail store, but I did give them a quick look. They both seem to have pretty bare bones email clients, but you can find some alternatives for the Fire on the Amazon App Store. The B&N store offers far slimmer pickings. As far as browsers go, both feature similar performance, despite Amazon’s claims about Silk. They render pages acceptably speedy, but any Honeycomb tablet or recent iOS device will feel quicker, especially when scrolling and zooming content. Amazon’s browser pulls slightly ahead in the feature department, though. The Nook’s browser is very short on features, and the Fire’s browser makes it easier to bookmark pages. The Fire also supports tabs in its browser, another advantage over the Nook. Neither offers a particularly overwhelming online experience, but neither is unpleasant to use either. Browsing was just slightly nicer on the Fire.
Content Offerings
Amazon trumps B&N in terms of content. There’s no contest. Book and magazine selections are comparable, but Amazon has a far richer ecosystem for apps, music, and movies. If you have a membership to Amazon Prime, the Fire’s offerings are even more compelling. The Nook offers apps for services like Pandora and Netflix to fill in the multimedia gap, but the Fire has full access to every music track, every movie, and every television show in Amazon’s extensive library. The only real drawback is that, due to limited storage space, the Fire relies heavily on content streaming and cloud storage, which is all fine and dandy until you want to watch an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where there is no, or very slow, wireless access.
The app situation is best illustrated this way. In Amazon’s store, you can find Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Bejeweled, Peggle, Plants Vs. Zombies, and numerous other beloved casual games. For the Nook, you can find Angry Birds and a knockoff version of Fruit Ninja called Samurai Fruit. I think Bejeweled is in there too, but the app selection for B&N’s tablet is pretty abysmal right now. There’s not much there, and what is available is not up to par with the quality of apps on Amazon’s store.
Both tablets are at a disadvantage merely due to the version of Android they are running. Because they are operating under such an old version of Android, their apps are basically glorified phone apps. For something like Peggle, it’s not a very big deal, but searching for productivity or email apps brings back several programs that look terrible on the larger screen. Why neither of these supports Honeycomb at the very least, which was released back in February of this year, is a mystery to me. Perhaps one or the other will eventually update their tablet to run a version of Android more suited to tablets.
The Final Word
If money is not an object, the iPad still beats both of these tablets in every category. Neither the Nook Tablet or the Kindle Fire come close to challenging the iPad’s dominance, but the Fire shows potential – the most potential of any Android-based tablet I’ve used to date. It sets a new standard for usability and aesthetic design on the platform, and Amazon features far tighter content integration than any other iPad-competitor. Its digital ducks are in a row, and I could see a future revision of the Fire being a serious alternative to Apple’s tablet. If just choosing between the Nook and the Fire, however, I have to say that if I had bought a tablet at Best Buy today, it would have been the Fire. Yes, the Nook has better specs on paper, but the Fire was more enjoyable to use, and that trumps any spec sheet.
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