If you’ve been looking at the increasingly crowded cheap 7-inch reader/tablet market, there’s a new option at the all-important $199 price point. Barnes & Noble just lowered the Nook Tablet to a $199.99 price point, if you’re OK with built-in storage falling from 16GB to 8GB. That gives the new dual-core Tablet, introduced in November of 2011, the same price and capacity as the original Nook Color, introduced back in 2010. Or at least it was the same price before this morning: the Nook Color now retails at $169.

So now when looking at color touchscreen Nooks you have three options: the Nook Color, with a single-core TI 800mhz processor, 8GB of storage and 512MB of RAM running B&N’s modified Android 2.2. Add another 30 dollars and you get the Nook Tablet 8GB, with a TI 4430 dual-core processor at 1Ghz, a full gigabyte of RAM and Android 2.3. Add another fifty and you get the Nook Tablet at its original price and capacity, $249 for a 16GB tablet.

Oddly enough, this price change paints the older Nook Color in a better light, at least as far as hardcore Android fans go. The Nook Color is easily moddable thanks to its SD card boot priority, and the development community behind it is massive, since options for cheap tablets with great build quality were small back in 2010.Conversely, Barnes & Noble locked the Nook Tablet down tight, and while basic software modification is possible, it’s a lot harder and more tedious. A locked bootloader and restricted access to user storage doesn’t help. Despite the Tablet’s more powerful hardware, the Nook Color is still the superior custom ROM platform. If you just want to read books and watch movies, go with whichever model you can afford.

Device Specifications and Information

Device Info

Device Name : NOOK Tablet

Manufactuer : Barnes and Noble

Carrier : NA

Announced Date : November 07, 2011

Release Date : TBA

Also Known As :

Display

• Screen Size : 7 Inch
• Resolution : 1024x600
• Screen Type : VividView IPS

Dimension & Weight

• Height : 8.1 Inch
• Width : 5 Inch
• Depth : .48 Inch
• Weight : 400 Grams

Battery & Power

Battery Type:
• Lithium Polymer

• Battery Capacity : mAh
• Talk Time : NA
• Stand By Time : NA

Software

Android OS:
• 2.3.x

Audio Playback:
• AAC
• AAC+
• AMR
• MP3
• WAV
• WMA

Video Playback:
• h.263
• h.264 / AVC
• 3GP
• MPEG-4 (MP4)

Hardware

CPU : OMAP4

CPU Clock Speed : 1000 Mhz

Core : 2

Ram : 1000 MB

Internal Storage : 16 GB

Front Facing Camera :

Camera Resolution : NA

External Storage:
• MicroSD
• MicroSDHC

QWERTY :

Cellular Network

Device Connectivity

Wi-Fi:
• 802.11b
• 802.11g
• 802.11n

FM Radio :

NFC :