Kindle Fire vs. Nook Tablet: Which One Should You Buy?

The Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet are both vying for that special place in consumers' hearts reserved for inexpensive consumption devices. But neither is perfect, and in many aspects of the tablet experience, one succeeds while the other fails.

Since we published our reviews, we've been getting e-mails asking us which is the better device. That's going to depend on what you value the most in your tablet experience. Are you looking for the cheapest tablet in town? Are you willing to pay a bit more for a better browsing experience? Which product provides better e-mail support? What about battery life? Is the Nook $50 better than the Fire? Allow us to break it down for you.

External design

The Kindle Fire took most of its design cues from the BlackBerry PlayBook, with the same textures and thickness. We found the rubberized back too soft and not good for gripping. The Nook Tablet is grippier all around, and the strip at the bottom makes it it a little easier to hold onto. The Kindle Fires sleep button is also poorly positioned, while the Nook Tablets is tucked away on one of the longer sides and the home button is on the front.

Winner: Nook Tablet

Storage

At first glance, the Kindle Fire comes with less storage than the Nook Tablet. Once formatted, the Kindle Fire has 6GB for you to manipulate as you please, while the Nook Tablet has 13GB. But as we found in our Nook Tablet review, only a solitary gigabyte is for you to use as you please; the other 12 are reserved for content bought from Barnes and Nobles stores. The Nook Tablet gets some points for its (empty) microSD card slot, but evaluating the devices as they come out of the box, we can't ignore that limitation.

Winner: Kindle Fire

Browser

Amazon paid special attention in development and marketing to the Kindle Fire's Silk browser, saying that it would predictively load webpages to provide a swift and seamless browsing experience the belied the tablet's modest internals. Barnes and Noble promised nothing special, other than that the Nook Tablet has a browser and you might want to use it because of the Internet. QED.

As it turns out, the Kindle Fire achieves better scores on the Sunspider benchmark, but the Nook Tablet's browser was generally faster and less frustrating in regular use. Amazon claims that the Silk experience will get faster as it culls more data from more users to achieve predictive loading symbiosis, but we have yet to see evidence of this.

Winner: Nook Tablet

MORE HERE