Perhaps the most interesting head-to-head battle in technology over the next month will be between the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet and the Amazon Kindle Fire. The two companies have long competed (and will continue to compete) with ebook readers. Next week, though, both will be offering their versions of "tablets" designed to do a lot more, specifically consume media.

Both products are 7-inch tablets running variations of Android, but because they use their own app stores instead of the Android Market, each will present a somewhat different selection of applications. Neither is trying to match the iPad 2 or the various Honeycomb-based Android tablets in speed, size, or breadth of applications, but both seem to offer a good combination of convenience and media access at an affordable price.

Barnes & Noble unveiled the $249 Nook Tablet this morning (read PCMag's Hands On With the Nook Tablet), positioning it as the company's "lightest, fastest tablet with HD entertainment." It runs on a 1 GHz TI OMAP 4 dual-core processor and has the Gingerbread version of Android, but again without Market support. True to the company's bookseller roots, it builds on the Nook Color with access to the company's online bookstore, plus 250 magazines and periodicals designed for the tablet. 

For streaming video, Barnes & Noble pushed integration with Netflix, as well as subscription-based deals with Hulu Plus and Pandora. Users can store media on Barnes & Noble's own Nook Cloud. It has built-in Wi-Fi with free access in Barnes & Noble stores and AT&T hotspots. The battery life will allow for nine hours of video, or five full-length HD movies, on a single charge.

The $199 Kindle Fire, which was announced in late September and is due to ship November 15, is a 7-inch tablet with a 1024-by-768 pixel display. It will integrate all of Amazon's services, notably the Amazon cloud for storing MP3 files, which it hopes you'll now buy on its MP3 site, streaming video, and books.  

The company encourages users to become Amazon Prime members, giving them access to a library of 10,000 "instant videos," including a fair amount of older TV episodes and a library of movies. It also now includes a lending library of 5,000 books, from which users can borrow once per month. While I love the concept of libraries—particularly physical public libraries—I'm not sure the content is deep or current enough to really satisfy most readers, though it's certainly a step in the right direction. The first month is free for Kindle Fire users, but then costs $79 a year, which also includes free shipping on many of the products on Amazon's site.

Perhaps the best advancement on the Kindle Fire is its new browser, called Silk, which uses Amazon Web Services to cache and, if necessary, reformat web content for the Fire. This should speed up web browsing. Although a number of people have laid out privacy concerns regarding this scheme, it isn't really a new concept. Opera Mobile, for one, has been using a similar concept, to good impact for years.

Amazon has yet to be very clear on other applications for the Kindle Fire. Presumably, we'll learn more next week when it ships. Here's PC Mag's first look.

Both companies are offering 7-inch displays, dual-core processors, and an emphasis on book and media consumption. The Nook Tablet is $50 more, but includes 16GB of flash memory versus 8GB, which should mean an even greater difference in storage, as system applications will take some of that storage, an expansion slot for adding more memory.

I'm quite interested in seeing how the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet actually compare side-by-side. My guess is they will both be quite good at reading books, but there could well be differences in the quality and amount of movie, TV, and even magazine content available, depending on what services the Kindle Fire supports. I'm also quite curious about browsing quality on each device and about basic applications, such as email.