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Barnes & Noble launches $199 Nook Tablet, relaxes storage restrictions

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from the Today @ PC World blog at PCWorld.com.

Barnes & Noble has released a $199 Nook Tablet with 8GB of storage to better compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

The new model has the same dual-core, 1GHz processor as the 16GB Nook Tablet, which still sells for $249. However, the 8GB model has half the RAM, at 512MB. Both models have a micro SD card slot for up to 32GB in expanded storage.

The good news is that Barnes & Noble is allowing users to store more content from outside the Nook Store on the device’s internal storage. Out of 8GB, only 1GB is reserved for Nook Store content, and 4GB is available for other content, such as movies and music. (The operating system gobbles up the rest.)

When the original 16GB Nook Tablet launched in November, Barnes & Noble took flack for its fine print, which said that only 1GB was allowed for outside content. That restriction still applies for the 16GB model, but the fine print now says that users can visit a Barnes & Noble store on or after March 12 to reconfigure the internal memory. It’s not yet clear how much space users will be able to free up for outside content.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet and Amazon’s Kindle Fire launched around the same time last year. Although both devices are low-cost, 7-inch Android-based tablets with simplified software, the Kindle Fire seems to be winning the war. A recent report by iSuppli put Amazon in second place in the tablet market behind Apple, while Barnes & Noble placed fourth, trailing Samsung. Neither Amazon nor Barnes & Noble has released official sales figures.

Despite the sales differences, PCWorld reviewer Melissa Perenson favored the Nook Tablet, calling it a worthy alternative to the Kindle Fire.

In light of the new model, Barnes & Noble also dropped the price of its Nook Color tablet to $169. The device looks similar to the Nook Tablet, but has a single-core 800MHz processor.