Nook HD VS Kindle Fire HD

After Google and Amazon both rolled out their new tablets, Barnes & Noble certainly refuses to admit being inferior and unveiled their new generation tablet, the Nook HD and Nook HD+.
In the 10-inch tablet niche, iPad is the King beyond dispute, but in the 7-inch area, the battle is bloody fierce. Therefore we mainly discuss the 7-inch size tablet in this article, namely Kindle Fire HD and Nook HD.
Let's have a horizontal evaluation between these two gadgets first.

Pros and Cons of Kindle Fire HD

Pros:

No doubt Kindle Fire HD has the advantage on price, you only need to pay $199 to get a Dual-core, 1G RAM, 16G ROM, and a Built-in Camera tablet.
Let alone the AppMarket which contains more than 51,000 apps, and the Amazon Prime account allows you to read thousands of books for free.
Another huge advantage of Kindle Fire HD is that its vast Ecosystem, imagine every people in your social circle uses Kindle Fire HD, but you are the exception, you can't lend book with your friends, can't share the joy or tricks of using the gadget, that will be definitely pretty boring for having such a gadget.
By the way, there are many third-party websites offering variety kinds of services for Kindle, such as Lendle (a community which allows you to lend books for free), and those tons of websites which introduces you free Kindle books everyday.

Cons:

The customized Android system is a bit closed than native Android, the interface may make you a little indisposed, it may make a skillful Android geek lost if it is the first time he hands on a Kindle Fire HD.
Amazon forces to show the advertisement when in the lock screen and home page, you need to pay $15 to call it off. And it doesn't support SD card slot, although 16 GB is enough for most users, but for some video lovers it is obviously not enough.
The size of Kindle Fire HD is a bit awkward as its width is slightly bigger than a single hand, sometimes you have to hold it with two hands. And the material of the back cover is kinda a "fingerprint collector".
Then turns to the processor, Kindle Fire HD's processor ranks at the bottom in the 3 popular 7-inch tablets, Nexus 7, Kindle Fire HD, and Nook HD. And for the battery, Amazon said the battery can supply 11 hours reading, video and surfing on internet. But the actual test show that it can only support 7 hours video watching.
Finally the principal shortcoming of Kindle Fire HD for eBook lovers, the eBook format and DRM protection. We all know that ePUB is one of the standards in eBook industry, but Amazon tookover .mobi and turned it into AZW and protected with its own Kindle DRM, which forces us to read the Amazon books with Kindle device and programs.

Pros and Cons of Nook HD

Pros:

The largest traditional U.S. bookseller has invested heavily in their new generation tablet, it equips an amazing screen which has 1440 x 900 resolution and 243 ppi, which is the best among Nook HD, Nexus 7, Kindle Fire HD. And the 1.3 GHz processor is also better than the 1.2 GHz in Kindle Fire HD, it is able to handle intensive games fine.
Nook HD is also the only one among those 7-inch tablets which offers you a SD Card slot, this will attract lots of video collectomanias.
It's width suits a single hand to a hair, you can hold it easily and comfortably. And it also weights 20% less than the already-extremely-light Kindle Fire HD, what's more, it won't show the lock-screen ads like Amazon's tablets, this gives us a pure and sheer user experience.
For eBook readers, the majority of Barnes & Noble books are in ePub format protected by Adobe DRM, which is supported by many third-pary reading apps like Aldiko, Bluefire Reader, DL Reader. We can have more choices to read Barnes & Noble books freely.

Cons:

Nook HD is lack of a camera while its rivals are all equipped with a front camera to handle Facetime or Skype video calls. And the worst disadvantage on hardware is the proprietary plug, which used to be a typical symbol of Apple devices, if you need a HDMI output signal from it, you will have to pay $40 for a adapter.
Then it's the price, with $199 you can buy a Kindle Fire HD with 16G ROM or Nexus 7 with a Quad-Core processor. As either ROM or processor is the most important spec which influences a client's purchase decision, therefore I have to say this is a huge shortcoming for Nook HD.
In the aspect of soft power, Nook is also at a disadvantage, neither the App Store nor Book Store is able to compete with Amazon's huge capacity. Nook's video service is not rolled out yet while Amazon's Instant Video has gathered a plenty number of clients. What's more, Amazon's appstore is going to open the door to Europe while we didn't hear any similar plan of Barnes & Noble.

Conclusion

Before opening your wallet and swiping your credit card, you need to make clever decision, and this is the reason why we compile this comparison for you.
This article doesn't want to tell you which one is definitely better than the other, the better one is the tablet which suits most.
In my private opinion, if you are deeply engaged with the stuff (videos, apps and eBooks) provided by the native content market, the Kindle Fire HD will be your choice for its huge capacity of resources.
While if you want a tablet which is friendly to hand on and carry out, and prefer to get the contents from variety of sources and is not restricted to Barnes & Noble store, Nook HD is prior to Kindle HD. The higher processor performs better when you play games, the excellent screen will satisfy your eyes when you watch HD videos and the built-in reader app accepting ePub and PDF allows you easily read most of books downloaded from computer.