Barnes & Noble just confirmed that it’s releasing an 8GB Nook Tablet, and the price may sound familiar: $199, the same as Amazon.com charges for its rival Kindle Fire tablet.
Also notable: In addition to reducing the storage, Barnes & Noble cut the RAM to 512 MB on the 8GB Nook Tablet. The 16GB Nook Tablet (which sells for $249) boasts 1GB of RAM, a selling point for the Nook Tablet in the competition with the Kindle Fire.
Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire has 8GB of storage and 512 MB of RAM.
Also today, Barnes & Noble dropped the price of its Nook Color e-reader by $30 to $169.
The announcement of the 8GB Nook Tablet confirms a report yesterday by The Verge. The price wasn’t previously known.
Numbers released last week by research firm iSuppli showed the Kindle Fire with 14 percent market share among media tablets in the fourth quarter — second only to Apple’s iPad (at 57%) and twice the market share of Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet.
Separately, Barnes & Noble today announced its latest financial results, saying total sales rose 5 percent, to $2.4 billion, in the quarter ended Jan. 28. Sales in the Nook business, including hardware and digital content, rose 38 percent to $542 million.
The company said sales on BN.com rose 32 percent, to $420 million, as a result of growth of in Nook device and digital content sales, overcoming a decline in online sales of traditional books and other physical products.
