When you get your Nook Tablet on Nov. 17, you'll probably start by rooting it and loading whatever Android apps you like. But even without rooting, Barnes & Noble has pre-installed Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Pandora, and offers an app store filled with everything from Angry Birds to a medical diagnosis app.
On Monday, Barnes & Noble unveiled the 7-inch $249 Nook Tablet, touted as the company's "lightest, fastest tablet with HD entertainment." It's expected to go head-to-head with the 7-inch, $199 Amazon Kindle Fire tablet also coming out this month.
Apps cost anywhere from $2.99 for a premium app, like "Angry Birds Seasons in HD," to $0.99 for a Fruit Ninja-like app called "Crazy Chef," to $99 for the "Patient Tracker" app that lets doctors manage their patients' information.
The Nook app store also features 11 categories worth of apps: Children, Education & Reference, Entertainment, Games, Health and Fitness, Lifestyle & Interests, News & Weather, Productivity, Social, Themes, and Tools & Utilities.
For more, check out PCMag's hands on with the Nook Tablet. As PCMag editor-in-chief Dan Costa notes, a key reason why the Nook Tablet costs $50 more than the Kindle Fire is likely because the Nook comes with twice the storage, 16GB expandle to 32GB versus the Fire's 8GB, of which only 6GB will be accessible to the user. The Nook also lets you side-load video (MP4), audio (Non-DRM AAC, MP3, MP4), photo (JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP), and text (EPUB, PDF, DOC, TXT, DOCM, DOCX) files via USB.
On top of that, the Nook App Store will offer more than 2.5 million digital titles.
For more, see Amazon Kindle Fire vs. B&N Nook Tablet vs. Nook Color: Spec Showdown and Will Amazon's Silk Browser Give its Kindle Fire a Leg Up On B&N's Nook? and click on the slideshow below.