The Barnes & Noble NOOK Tablet isn’t officially scheduled to go on sale until Friday, November 18th. But a handful of Barnes & Noble stores appear to have the tablet in stock already.
Several people have posted messages on Twitter indicating that the $249 tablet is already on sale. I called my local store and was told that it wouldn’t be available to the general public until Friday — but that some customers that had placed pre-orders were already able to come in and pick up the NOOK Tablet.
Update: At least one Liliputing reader has already spotted a NOOK Tablet in a store.
Your results may vary, but if you’ve been itching to get your hands on the tablet, you might not have to wait until Friday.
The news comes on the same day that customers are starting to receive Amazon Kindle Fire tablets. Amazon had originally planned to ship the tablet on November 16th, but the date was moved up and the first orders went out yesterday.
The NOOK Tablet features a 1 GHz TI OMAP4 dual core processor, a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage. It has twice the memory and storage of the Amazon Kindle Fire, and unlike Amazon’s $200 tablet, the NOOK Tablet has a built-in mic and microSD card slot. Neither tablet has a camera.
You can read more about how the two tablets compare and find out what other Liliputing readers think in our tablet showdown.
thanks Nate!