Barnes & Noble's Nook: New Niche?

I've been trying to make sense of the new Nook Color announced Tuesday. The good news is, Barnes & Noble (BKS) positioned the product away from the two market leaders, the Kindle (AMZN) and the iPad (AAPL). The bad news is, the Nook Color is neither an e-reader nor a full-fledged tablet, and the existence of a market between these two segments is unknown at best.

Nobody is quite sure what to make of it — which is either a problem or an opportunity. Can it compete with the A-Team?

Compared to Amazon’s Kindle, Forrester analyst James McQuivey claimed “This move puts B&N ahead of both Amazon and Sony.” It’s got color, a touch screen, a faster screen and (presumably) genuine browsing experience. It’s also twice the weight, almost twice the price, is limited to laptop-type battery life and has a fraction of the (paid) content.

Gartner and eWeek say the Nook Color competes directly with Apple’s iPad. It has a color LCD touchscreen that’s almost the same resolution as the iPad and a CPU that’s almost as fast. It’s also half the price and 8 oz. less. However, it’s a read-only device, with almost no apps, and a (as yet unproven) web browsing capability.

	Kindle	Kindle DX	Nook	Nook Color	iPad
Screen	6" grayscale	9.7" grayscale	6" grayscale	7" color	9.7" color
Resolution	600x800	824x1200	600x800	600x1024	768x1024
Autorotate	X	X		X	X
Touchscreen	no	no	partial	yes	yes
Size (in.)	7.5 x4.8 x.33	10.4 x7.2 x0.4	7.7 x4.9 x0.5	8.1 x5.0 x0.5	9.6 x7.5 x0.5
Weight (lbs)	0.53	1.18	0.72	0.99	1.50
Memory	4 GB	4 GB	2 GB	8 GB	16 GB
CPU	532 MHz	400 MHz	≤667 MHz	800 MHz	1 GHz
PDF	X	X	X	X