Nook Color or Kindle Fire?

I contacted Amazon about the Kindles.  2 are getting replaced free of charge.  The third was out of warranty.  40 bucks to replace that one.

These Kindles are for my boys, wife as an iPad.  I like my Smart Phone, but doing a lot of reading on it is less than optimal.  Id like a larger reader than my phone for myself…  I’m kinda digging the specs on the new Kindle Fire.

What says The Horde?

18 thoughts on “Nook Color or Kindle Fire?”

  1. I don’t have any experience with the fire, but as I mentioned in your other post about the kindles, I am really happy with my nook color.

    That said, if the Fire can utilize book purchases you’ve already made through Amazon, it may make more sense to stick with the Kindle line. If you do get a Fire, I want to hear about it.

  2. It largely depends on what you want out of it.

    If you already are heavily invested in Amazon content, don’t care about local/in-device storage, and want to save 50 bucks, Kindle Fire will probably work fine.

    If you want a device that’s had a lot more time to work the bugs out, can be (relatively easily) rooted and turned into a full-blown Android-based tablet, and/or want significantly more storage on-device, Nook Color is your choice.

    Those are the two big differences to me, and only one of them is a permanent difference. The Nook Color’s been around long enough that there’s a thriving mod community that has turned it into a full-blown Android tablet complete with multiple ROMs if you are so inclined. The Fire has yet to develop that.

    The other one is, the Fire has no means of adding additional storage, at all. The Nook Color has a MicroSD slot capable of containing a 32GB MicroSD card. If you want to be able to take a chunk of content with you to places where you have no wifi connection, that’s going to be pretty important.

    Also, rumors are that the Nook Color 2 (or whatever they’re going to call it) will be announced 11/7. Not only does this potentially offer a lot more power and flexibility, it could also mean a dropped price on the original Nook Color.

    For me, it’d likely be a Nook Color, as I don’t care about streaming Amazon’s content and I had my Android smartphone rooted and the ROM replaced about 3 hours after it became available, so modding and the like is important to me. If you’re already an Amazon Prime customer, I’d say definitely go with the Kindle Fire though.

  3. Wife and her good friend both have nooks and they love them. I use the kindle and stanza apps on my phone because I am already carrying it and I’m not going to lug another gadget with me.

  4. As I understood, the kindle was already an android tablet. The last report I had read was billing it as a serious competitor against the ipad. Biggest draw backs I saw was that they are fixed memory, and a larger screen version won’t be replaced until later. I would stick with the kindle.

    And how does one become out of warranty if you bought them all at the same time? I would be roaring at a supervisor. But hey, it’s cool they are replacing two of them.

    1. Both the Kindle Fire and the Nook Color are Android based, yes. But just like with, say, a Verizon smartphone, unless you root it, you’re not going to get rid of a half a dozen different apps, will be restricted in where you can get apps from (especially the Nook Color), and will not have all the functionality of, say, a Motorola Xoom tablet.

      Fun Fact: All the various Nook models are in fact Android-based. Not sure about the Kindles, they may predate it.

  5. I held off on a tablet until the iPad 2 came out. The screens on the Kindles as well as the capabilities for the price did not impress. Hard to read for my eyes. The iPad 2 totally impresses and is a darn good Kindle as well. Not only that it is rapidly replacing my laptop for business travel. I have some decent desktops for the heavy lifting.

    1. Kindle Fire is not a traditional Kindle though, with the eInk screen. It’s screen is pretty much identical to an iPad, just smaller.

      Given that it’s 200 bucks instead of 500, the smaller screen is really an okay tradeoff; the Fire and Nook Color are both 7-inch screens while the iPad is a 9.7-inch screen. Kindle/Nook are 1024×600, iPad2 is 1024×768. Pixels per inch are 132 for the iPad, 169 for the eReaders.

      Really, the tradeoffs come in screen real estate, system performance, and battery life. Oh, and a lack of iOS, though for some of us that’s a good thing.

      1. iOS is actually a feature for me. Been there done that with DOS, Windows, Linux, Mac Classic, OS X, Unix. etc. etc. all the way back to PDPs. One can argue for any of them and go down all sorts of philosophical rabbit holes all day long on the OS issue.

        Thing is, I use computers and associated stuff to make my living as an engineer. Apple’s walled garden is GOOD. Saves me at least 40 hours a month of admin crap. Worth it right there. That and the integration is so good I just plain spend more time working or recreating instead of ditzing around trying to make the things work.

        1. Oh absolutely. But for some of us, that 40 hours a month of admin crap IS recreation. Believe me, I get not wanting to bother and there’s sometimes I’m grateful stuff just “works”, one of the things I like (mostly) about Windows 7. But my gadgets do tend to be my hobbies, which means Apple strictly limits what I can do with a device.

          Hence why I said lack of iOS is a good thing for SOME of us. 🙂

          1. Now if messing around under the hood is recreating, that is a good thing! 🙂

            Concur re Win 7. Good stuff.

  6. do you know that there is kindle for pc. thats what i use and that is how i read uprising. i used kindle for pc on my lap top.

  7. Kindle Fire is definitely the way to go, works great, color reader with the power of any quality tablet out there, get this one.

  8. If color for video or say magazines and tech stuff is a necessity, and I didn’t want to mess with hacks,and I was looking for term parts and programming, it would be either Apple or Amazon not Barnes & Noble. Apple looks like it is going to “open” up the iPad for broadband service besides AT&T. The iPad might be of interest to you because of all the apps the military and others have developed for it. For myself, since I’m primarily interested in reading, an upgrade to a 3G Kindle Touch is a consideration.

  9. I had some very bad “customer service ” with my nook. I mean throw it out the window in frustration and run over it with the car bad. When it worked it was great. Not so much when it don’t

  10. Hands down, Nook Color…

    You can root or load Cyanogen Mod on the Nook and get a full android tablet.

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