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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Johnmcl7 - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
I'd assumed the two Tabs were identical bar the 3G, I found out about the downgraded Wifi version recently thankfully after I'd bought the 3G version as I'd been annoyed to have bought the wifi version and then found out about the inferior spec.I think you're quite right to say here the SoC downgrade is pretty terrible but I'd say the article doesn't make that very clear on the first page and the Tab intro.
John
VivekGowri - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
To be completely fair, it's not the biggest deal in the world - unless you're gaming a lot, you won't notice. And when I say gaming, I mean serious 3D games; Angry Birds and other casual games run just fine on OMAP 3.It just bugs me that Samsung was really, really not forthcoming about the SoC change at all.
Oscarcharliezulu - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
As a consultant, the cameras are extremely useful to take pictures of (non electronic) whiteboards, a presenter's ppt at a conference (where you might not be able to get a copy easily or quickly) and then add your notes to it. Lots of my colleagues do this also.I also use it to take pictures for eBay listings.
Im always surprised when a journalist states they can't imagine what the camera is for just because they don't use it. Hope this helps your research.
VivekGowri - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
Okay, this is exactly what I want - I don't use it, so I want to know what people do use it for. Thanks for your response!See, I do take a lot of pictures of documents, notes, homework sheets, etc, but even though I usually have a tablet with me (usually either my iPad or whichever one I'm testing), I mostly end up taking those pictures with whatever smartphone I'm carrying. It just feels much more natural to take pictures with a smartphone, either because the similar size of the phone and a point and shoot, or because we're just conditioned to cameraphones.
Like, I guess my question is more - when everyone has a smartphone/cameraphone, do tablets (which generally have the same or sometimes worse sensors than their smartphone cousins, and are more awkward to take pictures with) really get used as cameras that often?
mushu - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
Thanks for the writeup Vivek. Good to see a comparison here on anandtech. A few of points:- the OC kernel for the nook supports speeds up to 1.2 GHz and the previous kernel went up to 1.3.
- Many people feel there're significant differences wrt performance and usability between the latest linux (2.6.32-based) kernel and the one preceding it (.29).
- If you use the 2.6.32 kernel make sure you also use the latest B&N bootloader, otherwise you'll encounter several performance related problems, notably with video.
- Make sure you have good battery data and that you don't only look at one kind of task. When mucking about with custom ROMs and kernels and bootloaders you run the risk of suffering from errors related to battery calibration. I regularly get 8-10 hours of surfing and reading on my NC, ie. with screen and wifi on and never at peace.
- I hope you looked at the cyanogenmod settings dialog where there is a set of tablet tweaks! Most important of these is the ability to have the softkeys and the status bar at the bottom of the screen. About as limited as honeycomb tablets may get without standard hardware keys :P Ie. not very limited at all. Move the keys down Vivek :o
- Never mind the stock browser on any non-honeycomb android device. Check out opera mobile.
The nook is a great device for those who enjoy tinkering and who do not want to pay extra for things like cameras.
VivekGowri - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
Haha, right now I wish I had talked to you before I started this article. You know a lot more about this than I do, all of which I picked up in a brief amount of surfing on the XDA forums. I went for a quick root - just the latest rev of CM7 (about three weeks ago?), Google Apps, and that's it. I'm not a huge proponent of overclocking mobile devices, since the long-term wear and tear it results in tends to shorten the life of the system.I like the bar being at the top, and I didn't mind the softkeys being up there, it just required a little bit of mental recalibration. I'll check that out though!
Battery-wise, that's about what I was expecting - B&N quotes 8 hours of life with the wifi off, so 6.5 hours with a stressful wifi test sounded fine to me. I understand that people can do a ton of tinkering and tweaking to the OS for performance, battery, usability, whatever floats their boat, and I really love that about the Nook Color. I just wanted to get a feel for what it was at the base level.
MonkeyPaw - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
Yeah CM7 is constantly improving with nightly builds, so 3 weeks ago is actually a long time. There are other options that update, too. I ran rooted 1.2 until the beta 3.1 with sleep fix. I've been running the beta for a week and had great luck. Took maybe 15 minutes to get it running. The NC really is a great piece of hardware for the price. If you like playing with new ROMs as much as you like using it as a tablet, its a fun purchase. There's even an Ubuntu build under development.VivekGowri - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
I had the Nook for exactly 2 weeks, I didn't want to spend a whole bunch of time experimenting with various ROMs and nightly builds. I just grabbed the latest nightly and went from there. But that's basically what I was referring to - if you want to get really into that, there's a great community behind development for the Nook.Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
Can we get battery life and surface temperature readings of an 800 MHz Nook vs a 1000 MHz Nook?RomanMtz - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 - link
How does the Viewsonic G-Tablet compare to these at $289?