Kindle Fire vs. Nook Tablet: Which Should You Buy?
At a Glint
Expert's Military rating
Pros
- Slippy integration of cloud over and local computer storage
- Easy shopping for Amazon River books, music, videos
Cons
- Non as yielding and versatile arsenic other tablets
- Interface still has some bugs
- Sluggish performance
Our Finding of fact
The 7-edge in, Humanoid-founded Amazon River Fire will appeal to those World Health Organization buy books, videos, and medicine at Amazon, but it bequeath queer those looking a more versatile slate.
More or less the great unwashe want a tablet but don't want to scale out big bucks for IT. For those frugal shoppers, this week was special, as it marked the release of the $200 Amazon Raise Terminat and the $250 Barnes & August Nook Pill.
Which is a major purchase? I reliable both for a wide range of tasks–reading books, buying and watching movies, listening to medicine, browse the Web and answering email–and found that from each one has its personal strengths and weaknesses. As a solvent, the compensate one for you may depend on what you wishing to do with it. (I pick my front-runner for each undertaking to a lower place.)
If you're in the food market for a color e-referee, the Nook Tablet has the clear advantage, with its superior layouts and more readable, fewer glary display. Only if you're bespoken to buying and renting media from Virago, the Raise Fire may be what you're looking, despite its shortcomings.
To bring their tablets in at a relatively low price, Amazon and Barnes & Queenly had to gain sacrifices. As a result, neither pad of paper matches the versatility of the Malus pumila iPad 2, or flat the capabilities of a well-appointed Android 3.2 Honeycomb tablet, such as the Samsung Galaxy Yellow journalism 7.0 Plus.
Though the Corner Pill has slightly better specs than the Kindle Fire (including 1GB of memory versus 512MB), they didn't bear dramatically different performance, and some have their share of glitches.
Only a tablet's overall performance may not be as important as itd ability to do what you want it to set well. Here's my meet which pad is major at assorted tasks.
See Concomitant Slideshow: Top 14 Kindle Terminat Android Apps
Meter reading
Victor: Nook Tablet
Trade books, mass-market books, textbooks, magazines, newspapers, and children's books all look and function better along the Nook Tablet than on the Inflame Fire.
Both pad of paper's screens undergo a resolution of 1024 by 600 pixels, which limits how sharp the schoolbook they display can be. But the Nook Tablet's test is less reflective than Kindle Fervency's; the Liquid crystal display is secure to the glass, which mitigates reflection and increases counterpoint and sharpness. In comparison, I often encountered glare on the Raise Burn down's display.
I looked at the same magazines and books on apiece gimmick, and the Nook Tablet was the clear overall success at rendering text. At comparable baptistery sizes, text on the Corner Tab looked crisper than on the Kindle Fire.
In presenting standard books, the Nook Tablet offered more meaning screening choices. Though both tablets provide eighter from Decatur baptistry-size options, the sizes on the Corner are more useful. It's by all odds better for readers who need large type.
The Nook Tablet comes out on top for magazines, too. Barnes & Impressive seems to have a broader selection of periodicals than Amazon does. Also, the Corner's scouring bar for moving forward and back in the magazine is best constructed than the one on the Elicit Evoke. And the Nook Tablet's solitary-column text view makes Former Armed Forces more sense than Kindle Give the sack's awkward text sight, which fills the screen with hunks of text. Magazine text was Sir Thomas More legible on the Nook Tablet overall.
The Evoke Fire often garbled entire lines of text in magazine pages; and symmetrical when I zoomed in to enlarge a varlet, its text looked softer than along the Corner Tablet. When I zoomed in along a magazine page along the Kindle Fire, I had trouble controlling where I complete up–the screen was so sensitive that the varlet jumped all all over the place.
The Nook Tablet has access to a wider selection of children's books than the Kindle Fire, and presents them fitter. The Nook Tablet has a read-aloud feature, where a prerecorded vox reads the delineation book, as comfortably as new transcription capabilities, where you can record your own soundtrack to follow the book–a nice benefit for parents and kids likewise. Better quiet: Many children's books on the Nook Pad of paper undergo page animations: Tap a specially coded spot, the illustrations proceed. The Fire Fire versions of the Lapplander books lacked this feature.
Next: Physical Design, Navigation, and Web Web browser
Physical Conception
Winner: Corner Tablet
With physical volume buttons, a microSDHC wag expansion slot for adding up to 32GB of entrepot, and a video display that's less susceptible to glare, the Nook Tablet has the sharpness in physical design. You'll need the supernumerary space, still, since–though Barnes & Noble claims that the Nook Tablet has 16GB of storage–only 1GB of that space is available for users to store their ain stuff on (of the rest, few gigabytes are devoted to the OS, and the rest is settled parenthesis for content purchased from Barnes &adenosine monophosphate; Rarefied's store). As a matter of personal gustatory perceptio, I found the Tablet's gray bezel a bite distracting; I'd have preferred a darker bezel like the peerless on the Nook Color.
I liked the find of the Kindle Fire more than that of the Corner Pad, symmetric though the last mentioned weighs slightly less (0.88 pound versus 0.91 pound). But the Conflagrate Fuel's power button is easy to press by chance event, its speakers are poorly placed and lack physical bulk buttons, and IT offers barely 8GB of storage (6.54 of them substance abuser-accessible), with no expansion card slot; that's amount of space is insufficient for a multipurpose multimedia tablet.
Navigation
Winner: Kindle Flak
The Kindle Fire is easier to move around in than the Nook Pill is, largely because of its delightful, consistent design and menus, and because you crapper orient IT in either portrait or landscape mode.
Consistent navigation elements for home, back, menu, and search options crop up when you tap the bottom of the Fire's screen. The Fire also makes it easy to distinguish between content stored on the tablet and content stored in Amazon's cloud locker. You own to go back to the home screen to jump from united typecast of content to the other.
All of the Nook Tablet's navigation menus are locked into portrait mode. The effect can be jarring as you move from content displayed in landscape modality to menus that the tablet forces to remain in portrayal mode.
Navigating the Corner Lozenge did have some positives. When I tapped 'More' connected the home screen, I could watch shortcuts to books, periodicals, files, movies, and Television set shows that I had new accessed. Various types of self-complacent are accessible via a exclusive 'Library' push, subdivided into sections for books, magazines, newspapers, apps, and kids books. I besides liked being able to use the 'n' button to cry up the pop-up menu overlay with buttons for hopping to different sections along the tablet; unluckily, the overlay didn't work systematically from within apps, and Barnes & Blue-blooded didn't render a consistent rear button or carte clit.
Net Web browser
Winner: Elicit Fire
If you can get past any privacy concerns you Crataegus laevigata take most how Amazon's Silk Web web browser works, you'll find out that the Kindle Fire's browser high-performance to the Nook Tablet's.
The Fire's browser has tabs, just American Samoa the Android 3.x Honeycomb browser does. The Silk browser makes working with bookmarks easier, and information technology gives you mountain of settings for fine-tuning the direction it works.
The Nook Tablet's browser works, but it requires more taps to perform tasks, and navigating among twofold windows takes too many steps. On the plus side, text looked sharper in the Corner Tablet's web browser than in Kindle Fire's.
Next: Multitasking and Personalization
Multitasking
Winner: Neither
Neither the Corner Tablet nor the Fire Fire handles most forms of multitasking adequately. Sure, you can play music in the background piece you read. But when you move from matchless app to another, these tablets tend to close out the app, rather than suspending it. As a result, when you return to an app that you recently left, you may non give out back to the pip where you were last (some the Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire have email clients forget where you were).
Neither pad of paper makes it clear to users whether they're capable of true multitasking in the background. And neither handles switching among spread ou apps alright. On the Nook Tablet, a few apps appear in the bottom status display (including Pandora, the native music player), but their deportment is by zero means consistent.
To sum up, both tablets are significantly inferior to the iPad and to other Mechanical man tablets in their multitasking capabilities.
Personalization
Winner: Corner Tablet
With Mechanical man devices, you can choose the apps, shortcuts, and widgets that you want on your household screens. Merely both the Inflame Fire and the Corner Tablet have custom interfaces built along top of Mechanical man 2.3, and those custom interfaces give you remote less freedom to tweak them.
Still, the Nook Tablet offers many Thomas More personalization options than the Kindle Fire does. For starters, you buns add your own picture as wallpaper to any of the three habitation screens. You can also move popular books, periodicals, surgery apps to baby-sit anyplace on one of the home screens–including layering icons connected top of one some other. A scrollable roundabout of recently accessed or standard books, periodicals, and apps runs on the bottom of the screen. If you don't want something to appear there, you can just delete it.
The Nook Tablet besides provides more options for displaying your smug in its libraries. Most notably, under the 'Library', a 'My Stuff' tab leads to your own bookshelves (basically, message collections that span your apps, books, magazines, and newspapers). From My Stuff, you can peruse your files through a decidedly non-Humanoid-like file out viewer, interpret what's archived online, and view the books that you dismiss lend.
Amazon's Kindle Fire has a cleaner-looking home screen, but it's fairly locked down. You can't select a lock cover image Beaver State a background wallpaper of your own, and you have no control over what appears in the central carousel, which covers everything from books and periodicals to music and movies to apps and Web pages–and you buns't delete whatever of them. You tail end add cardinal apps to a Favorites shelf at the bottom of the expose, and you tin add multiple shelves. Oddly, you pinch down to find more "pinned" Favorites. I did the like being fit to drop behind preferent icons about to reorder them on the Favorites shelves.
Next: Buying or Renting Books, Medicine, and Video; Music Player; Speakers; and Email
Buying operating theater Rental Books, Euphony, and Video
Victor: Kindle Sack
Amazon's Kindle Fire Acts of the Apostles as a great vending machine for Amazon's music and video offerings. Amazon's TV store is every bit easy to use on the Kindle Fire as iTunes is on Apple products. The Kindle Fire simplifies acquiring books, periodicals, and music, and streaming or downloading videos.
On the other hand, I also appreciated the clean approach of the Nook Lozenge's Shop app, which lets you buy books, periodicals, and apps from the Nook Store. Its layout is pleasingly flexible.
Barnes & Noble doesn't sell video or music content; instead, it offers apps that let you stream content to the tablet. Hulu Positive and Netflix come preloaded, equally does Pandora, Rhapsody, and TuneIn Radio In favor. They're a good start–and they provide consumers choice–just the Nook Pill needs more options. B&N says that IT will let download and rental services ready to go on vital early next class; just for now, this pad is a good choice only if it already supports your chosen streaming service.
Medicine Player
Winner: Kindle Fire
The Elicit Fire's well-designed, convenient music player is one of its greatest strengths. The music thespian lets you sort by playlists, artists, albums, and songs. You can shop at Amazon River's music store from within the medicine player, and the integration is terrific. Navigating through and through the music stored along your tablet and through the tunes stored in Virago's cloud over is cushy, though you throne't build a playlist that includes some types of files. The Corner Lozenge's music player, lag, seems like an afterthought. IT's awkwardly planned and awkward to use. Trying to find music lavatory be frustrating, and the player–like the tablet's menus–is locked into vertical orientation course.
Unlike Amazon, Barnes & Noble doesn't sell downloadable music, thus the Corner Tablet has no built-in store for purchasing independent music tracks. Only it does come preloaded with optimized versions of TuneIn Radio Pro, Rhapsody, and Pandora. Barnes &A; Noble did a saintly job adapting these apps for the Nook Tablet. The Pandora app, e.g., seems designed for the Corner's screen–a vast melioration over the way of life IT looks on other 7-inch tablets.
Speakers
Victor: Kindle Flak
Amazon made a mistake by putting both speakers along the synoptic border of the Kindle Fire; time and again, I blocked the glower speaker while holding the tablet in two hands. Merely at least the Kindle Terminat has stereo speakers. And they complete fairly sufficient, too, at least for music. When I played videos, the Fire's sound seemed too faint; but that appeared to make up a software problem, not a computer hardware problem.
The Nook Tablet has a single one-eared speaker on its back. Sound sounded tinny and wiry. The original Nook Colourize likewise had a widowed speaker, and it's one area where Barnes &adenylic acid; Noble should let invested in an upgraded design.
Winner: Corner Pad of paper
Neither the Corner Tablet nor the Kindle Fire has a great native netmail customer, but the Nook Tablet's is the better of the two. It lets you jump into Gmail labels, for example; and emails resized better to fit the 7-inch vertical display. It's too bad that the email app displays mail just in portraiture mode. Also the Nook Tablet's electronic mail program lacks the Universal Inbox offered by the Kindle Fire.
Side by side: Pictures and Attribute Television, and Apps
Pictures and Grammatical category TV
Success: Neither
Our test images looked sharp and lovely on the Corner Tablet, which also played our 1080p .MP4 test movie swimmingly and with fine detail.
Unfortunately, the Nook Tablet's My Media gallery viewer app is a mess. IT dumps all of your images into a single undifferentiated top-level regar, regardless of any folders you may take up configured them into on your media card. Thumbnails appear as fuzzy, indisposed rendered squares. The app has a basic slideshow mode, but you bum't see image operating room movie file cabinet names, and you canful't prefer to e-mail an image to someone—all introductory functions in competing Humanoid 3.2 tablets and in Apple's iPad 2. Barnes & Noble says that its video player give the sack also plow 3GP and 3G2 MKV video, but I didn't endeavour those formats. The company also says that IT plans to improve My Media in a future update; but at this point, the app is a provoke.
The Kindle Fire's Gallery app makes images painful to view. It automatically resizes images transferred to the device, threatening resolution and dropping detail in the process–and making information technology impossible to zoom in on the image if you want to display something. The Fire resized one of my test images to 486 by 324 from its original 3888 by 2592 pixels. The problem lies entirely with Amazon's Gallery app software, since that same photo renders well on the Kindle Fire in a free image viewer that I downloaded, exhibiting finer gloss and saturation, and passably sharp detail. The same picture displayed in the Fire's native image veranda was much worsened.
Dissimilar the Nook Tablet's app, the Kindle Fire's Gallery app supports folders, shows rectangular thumbnails as well atomic number 3 straightforward ones, and displays image information. IT can play videos just as the Gallery app does connected the Corner Pad and on Android tablets in general. My 1080p .MP4 test video ran in the same video role player that the Flak secondhand for playing videos acquired from Amazon, complete with that instrumentalist's nifty 10-second rewind release. Amazon says that its video player supports impartial two file formats: .MP4 and Google's VP8.
My mental testing video maintained most of its sharpness and detail, though it did stutter in a couple of spots (the same video looked better and had no stutters on the Nook Tablet). In contrast, the Amazon-noninheritable videos that I tried in the same player looked bleary and often showed pixelation and artifacts.
The Corner Pad of paper is adequate for viewing pictures and videos, only I consider the Fuel completely unserviceable for viewing images.
Apps
Success: Neither
Much of a pad of paper's appeal rests in the apps you give the axe run on that–not just just how many are available, but how fresh they are and how inviting they look on the device.
Since you're limited to the apps available in the small app stores run by Amazon and Barnes & Aristocratical, neither pad of paper is a good alternative if you lack the hottest Android apps right away. You have no means of knowing whether cool apps will be available for either of these devices.
And since some tablets appear to lack capabilities so much as multitasking and (in the Corner Tablet's case) basic menu overlays, some cool naturally occurring and future tense apps may not run on either device.
Amazon and Barnes & Noble are trying to enlarge their app stores' holdings, but neither will approximate to the number of apps that Google Grocery store offers for Android 2.3 or that Apple offers for iOS. At establish, Amazon said that information technology had more than 8500 apps for the Kindle Fire, and it continues to add apps every day. Barnes & Noble says that it has over a 1,000 apps, and expects to have "thousands" by year's end.
As for how well apps work on the devices, the Corner Tablet shines in that expanse. Many an of the apps I downloaded seemed well modified to run on the tablet's 7-inch screen instead of looking like blown-up versions of standard Android phone apps. Barnes & Noble says that information technology works with its developers to optimize apps for the Corner Tablet, removing references to features that the tablet lacks, such as a camera or a GPS connexion. The fellowship besides says that, in curating what apps go into its store, it tries to filter out taboo bad-looking apps; the downside of this insurance policy is that you finish up with dramatically fewer choices than are in stock elsewhere.
To judge from the apps I downloaded, Amazon seems to lead to a lesser extent care to ascertain that the apps for its tablet work well and look good on a 7-inch screen. I say this disdain learning from a company representative that "we mental testing from each one app to make a point it works great lighted." Though I found fun games like Aerodrome Mania: First Flight (non available for the Nook Tablet) at Amazon's app store, the graphics looked fuzzy, American Samoa though they'd been blown adequate to fit the 7-inch presentation. With apps available for both Evoke Raise and Nook Tablet—such as Pandora and Quickoffice Pro–the Nook Pad of paper versions typically had healthier layouts and graphics. Even the Nook Tablet's Hulu Summation and Netflix apps looked major than the Kindle Fire's.
Provok Fire lets you sideload Android apps, but there's no warranty that they'll work, let unequaled display well. Apps that I sideloaded but that required the tablet's accelerometer, for lesson, wouldn't work. Sideloading is awkward, too: You take over to uncheck an option in the settings to allow non-Virago programs to install; then you have to access the Android .APK via a file manager app.
I've seen reports that Nook Tablet has a workaround for downloading Android .APKs via its Net browser, but forums report mixed success with this technique in the savage. We harbour't gotten it to work yet on our Nook, merely we'll keep stressful.
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Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/478388/kindle_fire_vs_nook_tablet_which_should_you_buy_.html
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