The Nook Tablet (sometimes styled NOOK Tablet) is a tablet

e-reader An e-reader, also called an e reader or e device, is a Mobile computing, mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and Periodical literature, periodicals. Any device that can display text on ...

/media player that was produced and marketed by

Barnes & Noble Barnes & Noble Booksellers is an American bookseller with the largest number of retail outlets in the United States. The company operates approximately 600 retail stores across the United States. Barnes & Noble operates mainly through its B ...

. It followed the Nook Color and was intended to compete with both

e-book reader An e-reader, also called an e reader or e device, is a Mobile computing, mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and Periodical literature, periodicals. Any device that can display text on ...

s and tablet computers. Barnes & Noble announced the Nook Tablet 16 GB version on November 7, 2011; the device became available on November 17 for US$249. Barnes & Noble released the Nook Tablet 8 GB on February 21, 2012. Both versions have a 7-inch (18 cm) screen, a microSDHC slot compatible with cards up to 32 GB in size, 8 or 16 GB of internal storage, a 1 GHz dual-core processor, and a FAT32 file system. Additionally, the 16 GB model has 1 GB of RAM, ROM of 16 GB eMMC, and 11 GB of storage capacity; the 8 GB model has 512 MB of RAM and ROM of 8 GB eMMC. The Nook Tablet models were discontinued shortly after the release of the Nook HD and Nook HD+. According to estimates by

Forrester Research Forrester Research, Inc. is a research and advisory firm. Forrester serves clients in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. The firm is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cambridge, MA with global offices in Amsterdam, London, New D ...

, about 5 million units were sold by mid-October 2012, making the Nook Tablet the third best selling tablet after Apple's

iPad The iPad is a brand of tablet computers developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple that run the company's mobile operating systems iOS and later iPadOS. The IPad (1st generation), first-generation iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010. ...

and Amazon's

Kindle Fire The Amazon Fire, formerly called the Kindle Fire, is a line of tablet computers developed by Amazon. Built with Quanta Computer, the Kindle Fire was first released in November 2011, featuring a color 7-inch multi-touch display with IPS tech ...

in 2012.

Design

The device is based on the Nook Color design by Yves Béhar from

fuseproject Fuseproject is an industrial design and branding firm. Founded in 1999 by designer Yves Béhar, the company works across an array of industries including beauty and fashion, furniture, and technology, and is based in San Francisco and New York Ci ...

. Its frame is gray in color, with an angled lower corner intended to evoke a turned page. The textured back is designed to make holding the device comfortable.

Supported file types

* E-books:

EPUB EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for ''electronic publication'' and is sometimes stylized as ''ePUB''. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smart ...

(including

Adobe Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...

DRM DRM may refer to: Government, military and politics * Defense reform movement, U.S. campaign inspired by Col. John Boyd * Democratic Republic of Madagascar, a former socialist state (1975–1992) on Madagascar * Direction du renseignement militair ...

or DRM free),

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

files, and CBZ files * Other documents: XLS,

DOC DOC, Doc, doc or DoC may refer to: People and characters * Doc, an abbreviation of doctor * Doc (nickname) * Doc (mascot), the Towson University mascot Persons * The D.O.C., American rapper (born 1968) * Doc Gallows (born 1983), ring nam ...

, PPT, TXT, DOCM, XLSM, PPTM, PPSX, PPSM, DOCX,

XLSX Office Open XML (also informally known as OOXML) is a zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. Ecma International standardized the initial version ...

, PPTX * Audio:

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

, MP4,

AAC AAC may refer to: Aviation * Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California * Airborne aircraft carrier, a type of aircraft * Alaskan Air Command, a radar network * American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New ...

, AMR, WAV,

Ogg Ogg is a digital multimedia container format designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of digital multimedia. It is maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation and is free and open, unrestricted by software patents. Its name is ...

(

Audio codec An audio codec is a device or computer program capable of encoding or decoding a digital data stream (a codec) that encodes or decodes audio. In software, an audio codec is a computer program implementing an algorithm that compresses and decompres ...

s: MP3,

, AMR, LPCM,

Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder ( codec) for lossy audio compression, libvorbis. Vorbis is most comm ...

) * Images:

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

(animated GIF is not supported), PNG, BMP * Videos : MP4,

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a mostly discontinuedAlthough it is discontinued by Adobe Inc., for the Chinese market it is developed by Zhongcheng and for the international enterprise market it is developed by Ha ...

3GP 3GP (3GPP file format) is a digital multimedia container format defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for 3G UMTS multimedia services, largely based on MPEG-4 Part 12. A 3GP container may consist of H.263 or H.264 video ...

, 3G2, MKV,

WebM WebM is an audiovisual media file format. It is primarily intended to offer a royalty-free alternative to use in the HTML video and the HTML audio elements. It has a sister project, WebP, for images. The development of the format is sponsored by ...

(

Video codec A video codec is software or Computer hardware, hardware that data compression, compresses and Uncompressed video, decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, ''codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while ...

s: H.264,

MPEG-4 MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related ...

, H.263,

VP8 VP8 is an open format, open and royalty-free Video coding format, video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008. Initially released as a Proprietary software, proprietary successor to On2's previous VP7 format, VP8 was released a ...

)

Comparison

16 GB version

The 16 GB version was announced on November 7, 2011, and became available on November 17 for US $249. Of the 16 GB internal storage, 13 GB is available for content, with only 1 GB available for sideloaded, non-Barnes & Noble content. Barnes & Noble announced that from March 12, 2012, users could bring their Nook Tablets 16 GB into stores for repartitioning to increase the internal storage for sideloaded content. On August 12, 2012,

lowered the price to US$199 to compete with the

. On November 4, 2012, the price was further reduced to US$179.

8 GB version

On February 22, 2012, Barnes & Noble released the Nook Tablet 8 GB at US $199 to compete with the Kindle Fire. The differences from the 16 GB model are: 512 MB RAM and 8 GB of internal storage, of which 5 GB is available for user content and 1 GB is reserved for NOOK Store content On August 12, 2012, Barnes & Noble lowered the price to $179. On November 4, 2012, the price was further reduced to US $159.

Modification

Rooting

Developers have found means to

root In vascular plants, the roots are the plant organ, organs of a plant that are modified to provide anchorage for the plant and take in water and nutrients into the plant body, which allows plants to grow taller and faster. They are most often bel ...

the device, which provides access to hidden files and settings, making it possible to run apps that require deep access to a file system or make changes to your device. For instance you can use apps to back up or restore all of the apps on your device. Numerous websites offer downloadable software and step-by-step directions to do-it-yourselfers.

Third-party apps and firmware update 1.4.1

When the Nook Tablet was first offered, users could install third-party apps. However, days before Christmas 2011, the forced over-the-air "firmware update from Barnes & Noble for the Nook Tablet and Nook Color — 1.4.1 — close the loophole that allowed users to sideload any Android app and also rokeroot for those who’ gone that extra step to customize the device.

Alternative operating systems

In addition to the stock firmware provided by Barnes and Noble, the Nook Tablet can run free, third-party, alternative Android operating systems such as CyanogenMod. These replacement distributions typically include advanced tablet features such as

overclocking In computing, overclocking is the practice of increasing the clock rate of a computer to exceed that certified by the manufacturer. Commonly, operating voltage is also increased to maintain a component's operational stability at accelerated sp ...

, a regular Android tablet interface, and access to competing app and content stores such as the

Google Play Google Play, also known as the Google Play Store, Play Store, or sometimes the Android Store (and was formerly Android Market), is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certifie ...

and

Amazon Appstore Amazon Appstore is an app store for Android-compatible platforms operated by Amazon.com Services, LLC, a subsidiary of Amazon. On August 20, 2025 the Amazon Appstore will be inaccessible on third party Android devices and apps bought from the Am ...

. Alternative operating systems may be run either from the eMMC chip or via a microSD card, which allows

multi-booting Multi-booting is the act of installing multiple operating systems on a single computer, and being able to choose which one to boot. The term dual-booting refers to the common configuration of specifically two operating systems. Multi-booting ma ...

. When the card is in the slot, the Nook Tablet will start from the operating system on the SD card. Otherwise, it will boot from the eMMC. While much of the replacement firmware for the Nook Tablet is available via free downloads, and instructions are readily available to install to either external microSD cards or internal storage, pre-installed versions on microSD cards are also available for sale by vendors who have tested and developed error-free versions and instructions for the free software and offer it for a price and in some cases, along with customer service and user forums.

References

{{Android tablets Barnes & Noble Android (operating system) devices Products introduced in 2011 Tablet computers Touchscreen portable media players