Barnes & Noble updates Nook Color with multi-media features

B&N is showing some love to their year-old Nook Color, getting video from Netflix, Flixster, and Hulu Plus. Nook Color users can now listen to streaming music from Pandora and Rhapsody after the update as well. This update should make the $199 Nook Color a more attractive offering, allowing it to compete more directly against Amazon’s Kindle Fire in terms of content delivery.

The Nook Color, with its single-core 800MHz TI processor and 512 MB of RAM was originally shipped as a color E-reader, but now seems to be positioned as a value proposition. The Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet is intended to be the “high-end” offering, and comes packing a dual-core CPU and 1 GB of Ram. The Nook Tablet is available for $249, which probably allows Barnes & Noble to avoid selling it for a loss, as Amazon does with their $199 dual-core Kindle Fire.

If you aren’t tied to either retailers ecosystem, the Kindle Fire is still the best deal in terms of what hardware you get for the price, but with this update Barnes & Noble is making a strong case that they will be supporting these products long after the initial marketing luster has worn off. Amazon may show long-term support too, but they simply haven't been in the tablet game long enough to have a track-record, although we reported earlier today that Amazon is prepping a large patch for the Fire that’s expected in the next couple of weeks.

Source: Barnes & Noble via Engadget