On every Christmas list this year will be a tablet. But none of us have stamped and addressed our letters to Lapland just yet because we’re trying to decide what kind of seven-incher (tablet, that is) we’re after.
Discounting the iPad mini (because there’s no discount. It’s £269), at the cheaper end of the market the competition is between the Google Nexus 7, Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD and Barnes and Noble’s Nook HD. Each starts at £159 for an 8GB Nook or a 16GB Fire HD or Nexus 7.
Both the Nook HD and Kindle Fire HD are trying to jump the fence from the e-reader market into the tablet race but without giving up their expertise on books — of which the Nook has 2.5 million and the Kindle Fire HD has one million.
The Nexus 7 also does books but the Kindle store has more of the ones you actually want.
There are gripes with the Nook. Its plastic edging means it’s not pretty. Annoyingly, it doesn’t use a standard micro-USB charger. There is also no camera (and in turn no Skype app available), while the other two include one for the money.
In its favour it is extremely lightweight (315g compared to the Nexus 7’s 340g and the arm-aching Fire HD at 395g) and has the highest screen resolution of the three. The Nook HD and the Nexus 7 are slimmer than the Fire HD, so they fit better in a single hand. But the Fire HD has the most powerful speakers.
The Nexus 7 looks the best and runs an unrestricted version of the Android software. The Nook and the Fire HD both run customised versions that make them easy to use for the quickly confused but also vastly limit function. The Nexus 7 also has the massive Google Play app store — on which there is also a Kindle app, with the whole Kindle catalogue (although the app can’t match the seamless interface you get using Amazon’s tablet). Amazon’s Appstore is limited and the Nook has curated apps for a customer base it presumes only wants the basics. The upshot is that neither Nook nor Kindle have apps you’d think were a given — such as YouTube.
Reading is still the Nook’s focus, which it does very well, and video, for which it has the screen quality. Books are categorised into curated channels — cleaner than Amazon’s recommendations (which pop up on your Fire HD home screen). Magazines on the Nook also display better and are easier to navigate than on its rival.
This leaves the Fire HD looking confused. If it doesn’t win the reading race it needs to compete as a tablet, yet using it you feel tied down. For example, there is no alternative web browser to replace the pre-loaded Amazon Silk.
The Appstore instead offers apps that most of us don’t really want. You can’t customise the home-screen or change your keyboard. The worst feature is a lock-screen which blasts you with ads — and you can’t change that either, unless you pay £10 extra to remove them or buy an ad-free version for £169.
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If you need your tech to be super simple, stick the Nook on your Christmas list. Everyone else, write Nexus 7 in big letters.