NOOK Tablet storage

One  of the key features that sets the Barnes & Noble NOOK Tablet apart from the Amazon Kindle Fire is the fact that the latest NOOK has 16GB of storage compared with the Kindle Fire’s 8GB. But it turns out Barnes & Noble has plans for that extra space — and only wants you to fill it up with items purchased from the B&N store.

In fact, according to Sascha Sagen, there’s only 1GB of storage space available to the user. That means if you want to copy your own music, movies, eBooks, or other data to the tablet, you have two choices: make sure you don’t have too many files, or buy an SD card slot.

Fortunately, one of the other features that distinguishes the NOOK Tablet from the Kindle Fire is that the NOOK has a microSD card slot, so you can add up to 32GB of storage.

But the decision to make only 1GB of internal storage available to users seems a bit odd… especially since Barnes & Noble doesn’t currently sell music or movies. In other words, most of the 16GB of disk space is reserved for the operating system, eBooks (which take up very little space) and apps.

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7 replies on “B&N NOOK Tablet only provides 1GB storage for your own files”

  1. That is a bit odd and seems like it will generate ill will rather than drive sales.

    But the SD option is really what separates it from the Fire… or put another way, the Fire’s biggest weakness.

  2. Who cares it will be rooted soon enough… isn’t that what pretty much everyone is doing with nook tablets/colors?

  3. Step one: Someone gets root on it.  Probably within a week of general availability.

    Step two: Someone releases a script to repartition the thing.  My money is on sometime this month.

  4. Is all that B&N reserved space on the NT already taken up by the operating system, or is it sitting there but unaccessible for storage?  If it’s sitting there empty, then perhaps enough of an outcry will result in B&N releasing an update that will free more of it.  Really dumb on their part to shout about storage space when they have a car parked in that garage already.  

    1. Out of the box there’s 0.99GB free of 1GB of user storage… and 11.62GB free of 11.87GB of B&N storage space. The rest is used by the OS.

  5. This is a total fail especially after all their smack talking about the limited storage on the Kindle Fire.

    1. Meh. As cheap as a 16GB MicroSD is, this wouldn’t stop me from buying one. Honestly, it’s the expansion of 16-32GB that would make the deal, not the extra 8GB on board.

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