Barnes & Noble launched the new 8GB Nook Tablet today (told you so), and they also pulled a little surprise on us.
Now that you can get the NT (with a dual core CPU & better screen) for the same price as the NookColor, the older ereader is all of a sudden not a very good deal.
So B&N gave it a price cut. You can now find the Nook Color for $170. (The refurb is still going for around $150 on Ebay.) Okay, this isn’t that much of a surprise, but I did expect it to get a deeper price cut. I thought it might drop as low as $150.
But still, $30 is a nice discount. For once, B&N will be able to undercut Amazon. That hasn’t happened since the summer of 2010, when B&N introduced the Nook Wifi (and dropped the price of the original Nook to $189). Of course, that only lasted about 6 hours before Amazon dropped prices to match.
I’m expecting Amazon to respond faster this time around. If they plan to drop the price of the KF, they’ll do it by 1pm eastern.
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I doubt Amazon will do a thing. They know the NookColor is long in the tooth. Although, unlike the Tablet, it has Bluetooth.
Concur. They can watch B&N flail around and drown. No need to throw bricks at them.
T minus 14 months and counting…..
If so, that fact is more important to me than then drop in storage. I would spend the extra $50
Should have been a reply to comment below.
Is true. Got it from B&N’s site
Looks like NT8G has cut the RAM in half as well.
It’s nice that they’re allowing more space for personal content, but I’d still rather pay the extra $50 for the 1GB RAM, and then get a memory card.
This is their “fifth” device so I guess this must be the “spring” release … ? I have to believe something more exciting is coming by summer, especially with what seems to be coming from Amazon.
Amazon started selling $179 refurbed Fires yesterday. That’s probably as close as they get to responding.
Refurbs were first listed at the beginning of Feb.
http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2012/01/11/daily-deal-samsung-galaxy-tab-7-199/
Yesterday was the first day I had noticed the “$20 off” on the Kindle Fire product page. I hadn’t noticed it earlier.
Amazon respond?
Depends on their sales rate of FIREs.
If sales are slow and the pipeline clogged they might.
But let’s not forget that the FIRE, in six weeks, sold more than a year’s worth of NCs.
By a lot.
B&N has acknowledged inventory issues to work out but there isn’t much evidence yet that Amazon similar problems.
If we don’t see an answer by this evening we can assume they won’t.
After all, there’s plenty of $99 tablets out there and Amazon hasn’t felt a need to answer any of them.
Except for the drop from 16g to 8g….has anything else changed with the N-tablet?…..did they do anything “new” to keep from rooting? If not ….going up the street to get one!
8GB went down to 512MB RAM
Amazon Responds to the $170 Nook Color - The Digital Reader // Feb 26, 2012 at 8:33 am
[...] Nate Hoffelder · No Comments · hardware newsWhen Barnes & Noble launched the new 8GB Nook Tablet and the cheaper NC on Tuesday, I knew it would only be a matter of time before Amazon responded. It took them until [...]