One of the big differences between the Barnes & Noble NOOK Tablet and the Amazon Kindle Fire is that the NOOK Tablet offers twice as much storage space.
While Amazon’s tablet has just 8GB, the NOOK Tablet is now available with either 8GB or 16GB. But Barnes & Noble reserves most of the space on the 16GB model for content downloaded from the NOOK Store, which means you only get 1GB of space for your own books, videos, or other files.
That means 16GB NOOK Tablet users get 12GB for downloaded content and just 1GB for their own use.
But Barnes & Noble has updated the NOOK Tablet website with a little fine print indicating that there’s a way to get access to more of that space. Or at least there will be soon.
If you want to re-configure the internal memory of your NOOK Tablet-16GB for additional personal storage, you need to visit your local Barnes & Noble on or after 3/12/12 for help in doing so.
In other words, you should be able to take a 16GB tablet to a Barnes & Noble retail store and have an employee repartition your storage for you. There’s no need to root your tablet or apply any dangerous, warranty-voiding hacks.
Interestingly, the 8GB tablet provides users with 5GB of accessible storage, reserving just 1GB for content from the NOOK store.
You can also always just add more space by inserting a microSDHC card into the tablet. It can support cards with up to 32GB of storage space.
Of course, if you’re cool with potentially voiding your warranty you can also replace the Barnes & Noble software with CyanogenMod 7 or other custom ROMs or attempt to repartition your disk space manually.
thanks Bob!
Brad, re-read note 6 at the Nook Tablet site. with the 8gb version, 5gb is available with only 1gb reserved for nook store content so users actually have 4gb available for their own stuff. Presumably the other 3gb is taken up for operating system, apps, etc. Frankly, with the apparent change to allow users to repartition, the Nook is looking better and better.
Whoops, right you are. I’ve updated the article.
They’ve been doing this for the NookColor for over a year now. It’s good to see that they finally added the NT.
 No, I’m woing. It’s under a year, sorry. B&N hasn’t had that 1GB partition rule for that long.