The Nook Tablet (sometimes styled NOOK Tablet) is a

tablet Tablet may refer to: Medicine * Tablet (pharmacy), a mixture of pharmacological substances pressed into a small cake or bar, colloquially called a "pill" Computing * Tablet computer, a mobile computer that is primarily operated by touching the s ...

e-reader An e-reader, also called an e-book reader or e-book device, is a mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and periodicals. Any device that can display text on a screen may act as an e-read ...

/media player that was produced and marketed by

Barnes & Noble Barnes & Noble Booksellers is an American bookseller. It is a Fortune 1000 company and the bookseller with the largest number of retail outlets in the United States. As of July 7, 2020, the company operates 614 retail stores across all 50 U. ...

. It followed the

Nook Color The Nook Color is a tablet computer/e-reader that was marketed by Barnes & Noble. A tablet with multitouch touchscreen input, it is the first device in the Nook line to feature a full-color screen. The device is designed for viewing of books, ...

and was intended to compete with both

e-book reader An e-reader, also called an e-book reader or e-book device, is a mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and periodicals. Any device that can display text on a screen may act as an e-read ...

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 Secure Digital, officially abbreviated as SD, is a proprietary non-volatile flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA) for use in portable devices. The standard was introduced in August 1999 by joint efforts between SanDis ...

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 The Nook HD and Nook HD+ are the third generation of Nook's line of color tablet e-reader/media players by Barnes & Noble for using their copy restricted (DRM) proprietary files, or other files. They are the successors to the Nook Tablet and b ...

and

Nook HD+ The Nook HD and Nook HD+ are the third generation of Nook's line of color tablet e-reader/media players by Barnes & Noble for using their copy restricted (DRM) proprietary files, or other files. They are the successors to the Nook Tablet and ...

. According to estimates by

Forrester Research Forrester is a research and advisory company that offers a variety of services including research, consulting, and events. Forrester has nine North America locations: Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York, New York; San Francisco, California; McL ...

, 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 iOS and iPadOS-based tablet computers that are developed by Apple Inc. The iPad was conceived before the related iPhone but the iPhone was developed and released first. Speculation about the development, operating s ...

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 techn ...

in 2012.

Design

The device is based on the Nook Color design by

Yves Béhar Yves Béhar (born 1967) is a Swiss-born American designer, entrepreneur, and educator. He is the founder and principal designer of Fuseproject, an industrial design and brand development firm. Béhar is also co-founder and Chief Creative Office ...

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 Cit ...

. 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 styled ''ePub''. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smartphones ...

(including

Adobe Adobe ( ; ) 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 used to refer to any kind of e ...

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 milita ...

or DRM free),

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

files, and CBZ files * Other documents: XLS,

DOC DOC, Doc, doc or DoC may refer to: In film and television * ''Doc'' (2001 TV series), a 2001–2004 PAX series * ''Doc'' (1975 TV series), a 1975–1976 CBS sitcom * "D.O.C." (''Lost''), a television episode * ''Doc'' (film), a 1971 Wester ...

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

DOCX 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 a ...

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 a ...

PPTX 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 a ...

* 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, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

, MP4,

AAC AAC may refer to: Aviation * Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California * Alaskan Air Command, a radar network * American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New York * American Aviation, a company from Cleveland, ...

, AMR,

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Wind ...

Ogg Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The authors of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high-quality d ...

(

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 Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals. It is the standard form of digital audio in computers, compact discs, digital telephony and other digital audio applications. In a PCM stream, the amp ...

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. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjun ...

) * Images:

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...

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

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia Computing platform, software platform used for production of Flash animation, animations, rich web applications, application software, desktop applications, mobile apps, mo ...

, 3GP, 3G2, MKV,

WebM WebM is an audiovisual media file format. It is primarily intended to offer a royalty-free alternative to use in the HTML5 video and the HTML5 audio elements. It has a sister project, WebP, for images. The development of the format is sponsored ...

(

Video codec A video codec is software or hardware that compresses and decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, ''codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while a device that only compresses is typically called an '' ...

H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distr ...

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 tec ...

, H.263,

VP8 VP8 is an open and royalty-free video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008. Initially released as a proprietary successor to On2's previous VP7 format, VP8 was released as an open and royalty-free format in May 2010 after Goo ...

)

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.

Modifying the Nook Tablet

Rooting

Developers have found means to

root In vascular plants, the roots are the 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 below the sur ...

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 such as Titanium Backup 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 Sideloading describes the process of transferring files between two local devices, in particular between a personal computer and a mobile device such as a mobile phone, smartphone, PDA, tablet, portable media player or e-reader. Sideloading ...

any Android app and also

roke Roke is a hamlet in South Oxfordshire, about north of Wallingford. It has a sixteenth-century public house, the Home Sweet Home. It is now included in the neighbouring civil parish of Berrick Salome Berrick Salome is a village and civil ...

root 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 CyanogenMod ( ; CM) is a discontinued open-source operating system for mobile devices, based on the Android mobile platform. It was developed as free and open-source software based on the official releases of Android by Google, with added origi ...

. 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 spe ...

, 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 and formerly the Android Market, is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certified devices running on the Android (operating sys ...

and

Amazon Appstore Amazon Appstore is an app store for Android-compatible platforms operated by Amazon.com Services, LLC, a subsidiary of Amazon. The store is primarily used as the storefront for Amazon's Android-based Fire OS. including Amazon Fire tablets, a ...

. Alternative operating systems may be run either from the

emmc The MultiMediaCard, officially abbreviated as MMC, is a memory card standard used for solid-state storage. Unveiled in 1997 by SanDisk and Siemens, MMC is based on a surface-contact low pin-count serial interface using a single memory stack subs ...

or via a

microSD card Secure Digital, officially abbreviated as SD, is a proprietary format, proprietary non-volatile memory, non-volatile Flash memory, flash memory card format developed by the SD Association, SD Association (SDA) for use in portable devices. The s ...

, 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 may ...

. 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