The Nook tablet is a great color e-reader with the "bonus" of being able to read your email, shop on Amazon.com, surf the web, watch tv shows on Hulu Plus, movies on Netflix, and listen to the world's largest selection of music on Pandora Radio.

B&N is still at a disadvantage with a pretty limited app selection compared to Google Play and Amazon's app store and of course Apple's App Store, but after being enamored with my work phone (iPhone 4) for about six months, I'm over the apps and much happier with the Nook Tablet's larger screen, with the 1 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM, there's plenty of power for my casual web browsing and video watching at home.

Bottom line: the Nook Tablet 8gb is a terrific way to read books and magazines while enjoying your favorite music (I loaded a 16gb memory card with thousands of my favorite songs...transferring the songs over to the Nook from my laptop was fast and easy).

To get to $199-down from $249 for the 16GB Nook Tablet-Barnes & Noble trimmed the onboard RAM from 1GB to 512MB (the Kindle Fire has the same amount of RAM) and internal memory from 16GB to 8GB (the Kindle Fire also has 8GB of built-in memory).

Neither an "E-Ink" reader nor a fully fledged tablet ( where we expect to see a much more open OS, expandable storage, and more flexible networking ), and while it does have direct competition in the Nook Tablet, Amazon hopes that it can do what only Apple has been able to do so far: create a closed system and make it work.

I was initially going to go for the nook tablet because it offered 16gigs with expandable storage over the kindle fire and had better review on some features.

The Nook Shop has a relatively small number of apps, each of which has been tested to verify it works well with the Nook tablet's seven inch screen...most Android apps are designed for a three inch or four inch screen.

I'm not going to go into all the features of the Nook Tablet-you can read the full review of the 16GB version to get the details-but what I will say is that I didn't notice all that much of a performance difference between the two Nook models.

On the Nook Tablet, which watching a video, if you tapped on the screen, you could easily option the Brightness setting bar.

For people who want MORE than just the world's best e-reader, Amazon.com sells a $35 SD card that converts the Nook Tablet into a conventional Android tablet with full access to Google Play and its vast array of Android apps.

Just take the SD card out and it reverts back instantly to the Nook Tablet you bought.

For whatever reason (some people speculate NetFlix content protection) the Nook Tablet is boot-protected/requires a signed bootloader so it will not boot off an SD card like the Nook Color.

I read about the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet - the Fire only had 8GB of onboard storage at the time, and no micro SD slot.

Beyond app-based entertainment, you can also "sideload" content onto the Nook Tablet by connecting it to the USB port on your computer and dragging and dropping files onto the device's internal memory or the microSD card you've slipped into the expansion slot.

The Nook Tablet gives a better reading experience, a better screen, faster browser, and even more important: a microSD slot (for up to 32 Gb of additional memory).