As expected, Barnes & Noble is getting back into the tablet game. The new B&N NOOK Tablet 10.1 is up for pre-order for $130 and it should start shipping November 18th.

You might want to wait though — B&N has already announced it’ll be on sale for $10 off if you buy the tablet between Nov 22nd and Dec 26th.

At first glance that looks like a decent price for a tablet with a 1920 x 1200 pixel IPS display, 32GB of storage, a microSD card slot, a headset jack, and support for the Google Play Store (something that’s not available out-of-the-box if you spend $20 more to buy Amazon’s 10 inch tablet).

But we don’t know much about the processor, software, or other key features. So I’ll reserve judgement until more info is available.

The Nook Tablet 10.1 appears to be manufactured by a Chinese OEM called Jingwah Information Technology, and B&N says it should provide up to 7 hours of battery life… or maybe 8.5 hours of battery life, depending on which part of the product page you’re looking at.

Barnes and Noble

There’s no word on what processor the tablet features, how much RAM it has, what version of Android it runs, or how heavily B&N has modified the user interface to emphasize it’s own book store and other apps and content.

What we do know is that the Nook Tablet 10.1 measures 10.3″ x 6.2″ x 0.4″ and features a micro USB port, 2MP front and rear cameras, and 802.11ac WiFi. It supports microSD cards up to 256GB in size, and it has one advantage over Amazon’s tablets — you can receive free in-store support at Barnes & Noble locations. While Amazon has started to dip its toe into the bricks and mortar retail business, B&N stores are still a little more common.

The tablet also has the same soft-touch back cover as previous NOOK tablets, and there’s apparently a set of Pogo pins on one side — B&N plans to offer an optional charging dock and an optional portable keyboard cover that connects to those pins.

There will be a “cookbook bundle” promotion starting November 22nd that lets you pick up a NOOK Tablet 10.1 plus a charging dock for $160 and get $50 worth of Good Housekeeping digital cookbooks.

I haven’t seen a price or release date for the keyboard cover yet.

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11 replies on “B&N launches the $130 Nook Tablet 10.1”

  1. > up to 7 hours of battery life… or maybe 8.5 hours of battery life, depending on which part of the product page you’re looking at.

    B&N needs a proofreader…

    Rooting for these guys to do fairly well with this. I still haven’t forgotten how they battled Microsoft over Android IP (of all things). They also offered a (competitive?) option to Amazon’s tablets. Also, if I recall this last bit – their original tablets were fairly root-friendly.

    Any tablet that’s root-friendly has a built-in killer feature, in my book…

  2. I am hoping the specs are better than the comparable Fire tablet. Amazon loads an awful lot of their own apps on their tablets then hobbles them with a pitiful amount of memory.

  3. I hope this one easy to root and less intrusive than the Fire HD tablet. My HD10 is rooted and I got Nova launcher working just fine but the device is incredibly aggressive with updating itself (with no version number change) messing everything up making me re-do the process.

    1. That’s why I decided not to bother rooting my HD10. It was too complicated for me to do anyway.

      I rooted my Fire 7 and that was easy. But that tablet was slow as mollases. I love my HD10, even with Fire OS. I installed the Google Play store and even Nova Launcher, but I don’t use Nova because I don’t want to install launcher hijack.

    1. They must think there’s a market. I love my Fire, but I liked my old Nook HD+ even better. Being standard Android is better than Fire OS.

  4. “it’ll be on sale for $10 if you buy the tablet between Nov 22nd and Dec 26th.”

    You mean it’ll be $119.99 with $10 off.

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