Both tablets’ built-in e-mail apps are serviceable but nothing special. Neither handles corporate mail but they each have a straightforward interface and can handle multiple standard mail accounts from the likes of Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft and others.
As far as the on-screen keyboards go, the Kindle Fire’s features a row of special characters at the top and you can type numbers by holding down certain keys, which makes entering complex text relatively easy—your password is a mixture of letters, numbers and symbols, right? The Nook Tablet’s keyboard, however, features better spacing between the keys, which makes entering simple text much easier.
Content
Amazon takes the cake here, provided you want to be able to do stuff other than read books. When you unbox the Kindle Fire for the first time, your Amazon account is already preloaded onto the device and any books, music, TV shows, movies or apps you’ve purchased in the past are sitting there on the various shelves waiting to be streamed or downloaded. It’s one of the best out-of-the-box experiences of any consumer electronics product in recent memory.
Aside from being able to purchase digital entertainment content directly, the Kindle Fire’s app store has a wider selection of apps and offers a free app each day. By comparison, the Nook Tablet’s app store features a much more tightly curated selection of apps, and you’ll have to load your music and videos onto the device yourself or use one of several streaming apps.
The Nook Tablet, however, makes for a better overall reading experience—especially for magazines and children’s books. Certain children’s books can be read aloud with the “Read To Me” feature, many feature interactive activities and you can even use the Nook Tablet’s microphone to record yourself reading your kids’ favorite books.
So basically the Nook Tablet wins for straight-up reading, but the Kindle Fire trounces it soundly when it comes to just about any other type of content.
Overall
The advantages of one tablet over the other will vary based on your individual needs: The Kindle Fire is $50 cheaper, but the Nook Tablet’s good for people new to tablets since you can head over to any Barnes & Noble store for help. And as mentioned above, the extra $50 gets you snappier performance, better build quality, and slightly longer battery life as well.
The software running on both devices is a toss-up: The Kindle Fire’s overall interface is extremely intuitive and charming, while the Nook Tablet’s wins points for integrating various media features and overall responsiveness.
As for content, the Kindle Fire does an amazing job of gathering all your intangible Amazon purchases in one place and making it easy to add to your collection. If you’re looking for an inexpensive tablet with great overall content integration, the Kindle Fire is hard to pass up—especially given its $199 price tag. The Nook Tablet, on the other hand, provides the best overall experience for avid readers, magazine lovers and people with young children.
And finally, neither of these tablets are going to kill the iPad. If you’ve got your heart set on an iPad and you’re wondering whether you can get the same or better experience in a 7-inch tablet for $250 to $300 less, it’s just not possible right now. What you do get with either of these 7-inch tablets, though, is a relatively inexpensive, well-designed and portable device good for casual consumption of various media.