Barnes & Noble Lowers The Price of Its Nook Tablets & Tablets Are An Easy Sell For Millennials

Barnes & Noble Lowers The Price of Its Nook Tablets: Barnes & Noble has lowered the price of its 7” tablets: The Nook Color and Nook Tablet. Despite the names both really are entry level Android (aka running Google’s operating system) tablets and not just fancy e-book readers. And B&N has cut the price of the Nook Color and 8 GB Nook Tablet by $20 to $150 and $180 respectively; and has dropped the price of the 16 GB Nook Tablet by $50 to $200.

It is not difficult to see why B&N has lowered the prices on its series of tablets – Google’s new Nexus 7 costs $199, is selling like proverbial hotcakes, and really is an Android Tablet – translation – it has more bells and whistles like a front facing camera for video chats. The B&N tablets are very nice but are really fancy color e-readers made to consume e-books and media content from Barnes & Noble. Ditto that for Amazon’s Kindle series –for although it is true you can get apps for all the B&N and Amazon tablets they really are devices created to primarily access content from their respective stores – e-books, music, video and limited app content from B&N and Amazon. The Nexus 7 in contrast allow you to access all the 600,000 apps in the Google App Store, offers a front facing camera, access to a greater variety of media content and additional bells and whistles.  And all of that is not to mention the fact that Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are expected to unveil new tablets by the end of the year so it really isn’t surprisingly that Barnes & Noble has lowered the prices on its tablet series.

Here’s a link to a PC World article on the Nook Price Cuts:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/260783/barnes_and_noble_cuts_nook_prices.html

And a link to the Google Nexus 7 page:

https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_7_8gb

Tablets Are An Easy Sell For The Millennials:  Rob Enderle, a tech writer for TechNewsWorld, offers an article this morning titled The Windows 8 Generation Gap: Size Matters. And I have to start out my comments about the article by pondering how fast the years go! I think the author, who describes himself as being part of the generation that came of age in the opening days of the PC era, is probably in his forties just like me. And I have to say in reading his article I was left with that feeling of oh-how-fast-time-flies! Because I too recall first getting a PC when they were the new, cool tech item and how exciting that was and how cool it was to send those early e-mails and work on those early Macs here at the library in the eighties! And I agree with Mr. Enderle that change is harder for people as they get older and that those people that have come of age since the year 2000 are much more likely to like using tablets right off the top than those of us who came of age earlier. It makes sense because those people grew up with the Internet, and later touch screens and smart phones  and are really are native users of those devices and thus can type up a storm on a touch screen device whether that typing consist of texting someone else or typing an email. In contrast, computer users who are older than the Millennials might love tech gadgets but like yours truly might not like to type on a virtual tablet keyboard. I don’t  have to worry for I known physical keyboards are likely to be around for a number of years to come but eventually, I am sure, they too will fall out of mainstream usage just like typewriters have in the last twenty odd  years. Of course if they just hurry up and perfect voice recognition technology – I’ll be all set! I won’t have to type at all I’ll just be able to talk to my tablet and tell it what to do – and I can do that!

Here’s a link to the Enderle article titled The Windows 8 Generation Gap Size Matters:

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/The-Windows-8-Generation-Gap-Size-Matters-75868.html

Linda R.