Conclusion
The Nook has a retail price of $249, the Galaxy Tab, $349. That $100 difference buys a decent amount - a faster processor, a more compact frame, better battery life, and real support. With the Galaxy Tab, you’re very much buying a finished product, whereas with the Nook, you’re buying a device that you can hack to oblivion. There will always be little bugs with CM7 or any other custom ROM you might decide to use for the Nook, but you have the flexibility and the freedom to do whatever you want the system. Overclocked kernels, custom skins and launchers, updating the ROM to the latest nightly build, anything you could possibly dream of. You can do most of that with the Samsung as well, but the Galaxy Tab does provide a more polished and more finished feeling UX out of the box.
And honestly, the Galaxy is the better tablet here. It’s more powerful than the Nook, it’s more polished than the Nook, and it has more features than the Nook. The downsides? It doesn’t have as good a screen and it’s 40% more expensive. The extra money gets you a lot of the features that are expected in a tablet device these days, but here’s the way I see it.
At $249, the Nook Color is $20 more expensive than an 8GB iPod touch. At $349, the Galaxy Tab WiFi is $50 less expensive than a 16GB ASUS Eee Pad Transformer. Put in terms like that, the Nook Color looks like a pretty good deal, and the Galaxy Tab really doesn’t. As tablets running phone-centric versions of Android, the Nook Color and the Galaxy Tab are pretty similar. The hardware and UI details might be a little bit different, but the core usage model is the same. The Tegra 2-Honeycomb combination changes that in a massive way. That $50 difference between the Galaxy Tab and the Transformer basically represents the jump from a netbook to a MacBook Pro or similarly specced PC. It’s much more powerful on a hardware level, it has a larger, higher resolution IPS display, and it’s running Honeycomb. I’m picking on the ASUS specifically because it’s the least expensive Honeycomb tablet on the market, but any Android 3.0/3.1-based tablet represents a significant step up from the 7” tablets, whether it be the Xoom, Transformer, Acer Iconia (review forthcoming), or one of the larger 8.9”/10.1” Galaxy Tabs. It’s a different world when you get to Honeycomb, and the 7" Galaxy Tab just doesn’t have the hardware or software to compete with them.
Neither does the Nook Color (until a working Honeycomb ROM is released), but the point is, it doesn’t really have to. If you’re looking for a cheap tablet around the $250 mark, it doesn’t have much in the way of real competition. The Galaxy Tab is a better tablet than the Nook, but it isn’t nearly as hacker-friendly and once you get to the $350-400 price range, there’s a lot more options to think about.
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seamonkey79 - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
I've got a Nook Color, and it took all of about 10 minutes to get all of the tools needed to flash a new ROM to it... now I've got a 1.1 Ghz (1.2 Ghz is available and stable on mine, but a little warmer than I like) tablet that in many ways performs better than my Droid Incredible does, especially when I pair the 3g from the DInc to the NC. Given the price I paid for it and the fact that it is a smashing book reader as well as all around good guy tablet, money well spent in my opinion :-)I've also read posts about people selling or trading their Galaxy Tabs for Nook Color after they bought one for a spouse or child and played with it a little bit.
KaarlisK - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
What about the Creative Ziio 7? It also has a Cortex A8 and 512MB of RAM, though I have no idea about the capabilities and drivers of its GPU. Costs around $350 in Europe.mcnabney - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
I wouldn't buy another Creative product on principle alone.Stanil - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
The hardware on the Galaxy Tab Wi-Fi is different to the 3G model (at least in some markets). Gone are Bluetooth 3.0, HDMI out. The SOC is not Hummingburd, but a more cheap A8(OMAP 3630?) and the GPU is PowerVR530 not 540 as in the 3G model.http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/galaxy-tab-wifi-o...
http://androidcommunity.com/wifi-only-galaxy-tab-7...
medi01 - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
Recently bought Archos 7 Home Tablet for 129 Euro, actually as a video player in a car.You know, dear Anand, it has quite a good screen.
Remembering how (among ebook reader fans) Nook is mostly regarded as "cheap plastic junk" I wonder if it is worth is to read your article.
VivekGowri - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
Doesn't the Archos 7 Home Tablet have a 800x480 resistive touchscreen? That says it all.I didn't mention Archos at all in this article, as far as I recall, but really, put the Nook Color next to the Archos or any one of the random tablets I mentioned in the beginning and you will see the difference. I have verifiable, tested numbers to support my claim.
As for the "cheap plastic junk" rep, I can understand the plastic part, but it's definitely not cheap feeling or junk - it's either the best designed and best built $250 tablet, or very close to it. I haven't seen anyone make that claim yet, and based on my experience (I tend to be more picky about design and build quality than some of my colleagues), it's a solid, attractive little tablet.
velis - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
That wasn't the point of what madi was saying.For the purpose, the Archos provides 720p movie playback which nook doesn't.
But as you probably saw from the other replies, we'd very much like to see two things in the next budget tab comparison:
1. Get EVERYTHING out of a particular tablet: overclock the nook if it can be overclocked to see if then it can offer the feature (HD playback) it couldn't provide stock
2. Compare more tablets. Out of the three, the Archos is by far the cheapest and has its uses, even if it is only 800x480 resistive... No need to play a snob here, we're looking at *budget* tablet coparison. Also ASUS eee pad should also be in this comparison even if it is ridiculously overpowered compared to the others. As you yourself said: if's only $50 more...
On a side note: I think for anything android based one of the most important things to consider is custom ROMs. Because manufacturers tend to "forget" to update pretty soon after release. Presence of custom ROMs ensures the tablet / phone will be upgradable in the future and that allows for longer useful life of the device. You really should include this information in the review and most definitely you shouldn't post false information - as in Galaxy having no custom ROMs.
VivekGowri - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
The video decode chip in the OMAP 3621 SoC doesn't support HD video decode, so the Nook Color won't be able to playback HD videos regardless of how high you overclock it. It's a hardware issue on the SoC level, that won't change.I didn't say that the Galaxy Tab had no custom ROMs or it wasn't rootable or anything - I think my wording was poor, so it came across like that. I updated it to be clearer, but what I was trying to get across was this: the Nook depends on that to survive, while custom ROMs aren't nearly as relevant to the Galaxy Tab, which comes with a usable image from the factory.
I could have looked at more tablets, theres a few out there (eLocity A7, Creative Ziio, and Archos 70) which would potentially be worth looking at, but I kind of drew the line at WSVGA screen resolution. I've used WVGA 7" tablets, and they're just not very good. I'm more interested in some of the upcoming stuff - HTC Flyer (if they drop the price to reasonable levels), the Acer Iconia A100, etc, which have the design and UX polish to compete with these two.
velis - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
Don't get me wrong: I think this was a great article and I'd very much like to see more of such in the future since I'm seriously contemplating going tablet. I assume I'm not the only one :DAs for the reply:
OK, this I can dig, but in this case you should clearly state at the beginning of the article that you filtered by resolution. That doesn't excuse you from not including the Asus though :)
Also the info posted for contenders should be well balanced - reference to custom ROMs, overclocking and similar stuff here - if you delve into it for one, you should do as much for the other(s) too.
And thanks for replying :)
Ragin69er - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
I appreciated this article, as an owner of a 3g Galaxy Tab I have rooted it and am running a custom gingerbread rom called Overcome which allows for up to 1.4ghz overclock. I also have a fix from a guy named chainfire which allows me to play almost every game made for tegra 2 (there are one or two games that won't play yet). Proving that the tegra 2 chipset at least to me isn't considerably more powerful than the powervr 540.Also another member at XDA forums called spacemoose is ensuring that the galaxy tab will be running Honeycomb 3.1 this very week :)
I appreciate the 7" form factor much more than the 10" form factor, I seem to be able to put my galaxy tab in a pocket no matter the weather conditions. Can't say that about nearly any other tablet.