Nook Tablet launched by Barnes & Noble, last fall were priced a little bit higher compared to Kindle Fire tablet of Amazon.com, which they have been selling like hot cakes. Only difference was that Nook tablet has more storage space but inorder to remain competitive with Amazon, Barnes & Nobel has slashed prices of its tablets.
Barnes & Noble has announced a new version of its Nook Tablet with 8 gigabytes of storage at a price of $ 199 matching the Kindle Fire on both points. The previous version of the Nook Tablet, which was released in November, is exactly the same as the new lower-priced offering, except it has 16 gigabytes of built-in storage and was priced $249. The price of Barnes & Noble’s other 8-gigabyte tablet, known as the Nook Color, was reduced from $199 to $169 on Tuesday as well.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s tablets have 7-inch touchscreens with 1024-by-600 pixel resolutions and run on 1-gigahertz processors. The Nook Tablet has 1 gigabyte of RAM, as opposed to the Fire and Nook Color, which both have 512 megabytes of RAM. The two devices are slightly different shades of gray and the Nook Tablet runs a different version of Barnes & Noble’s flavor of Google’s Android operating system. Because of the software differences, the Nook Tablet can run a larger number of apps than the Nook Color.
Along with the price cuts, Barnes & Noble announced that Nook sales and digital sales rose in the New York bookseller’s fiscal year third quarter, which ended Jan. 28. Barnes & Noble defines its content sales as those of digital books, newspapers, magazines and apps.
From above developments, Our honourable HRD minister- Kapil Sibbal – should take cue how to get good tablet at competitive prices. Despite best efforts of HRD ministry, they are not able to get Aakash Tablet from Datawind at agreed price of US$ 35, which is unrealistic price. If Mr. Sibbal is seriously interested to distribute tablets to students in India then the best course for him would be to source it from Taiwan/China which is the hub of tablet suppliers. All the reputed suppliers like Apple,Amazon and Barnes & Noble, are sourcing their tablets from above region.
If Nook Tablet can be sold for $ 199, which roughly means INR 10,000 and if you deduct profit of minimum 10% then its actual price works out to Rs.9000/-. If HRD minister place bulk order for similar tablets then they will certainly get some reduction in prices. Mr. Sibbal should not pursue Datawind because it won”t be possible for them to supply workable tablet for $35. I fail to understand how Mr. Suneet Singh Tuli of Datawind arrived at selling figure of $35.
It is another matter if the HRD ministry just want a box for $35 to be thrown in trash can. This will be another harakiri with taxpayers money.
