Kindle or Nook?

With the shopping season already underway, it's the perfect time to decide which tablet computer you're going to ask Santa to bring you for Christmas. For those whose "Santa" is not likely to shell out the five hundred dollars or more for an iPad or one of it's Android competitors, there's good news. Just in time for the season, both Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook have decided to step it up from their e-reader format to offer budget tablet alternatives. While they may lack some of the functionality of their higher-priced competitors, both still manage to offer almost everything you're looking for in a tablet. And with more textbooks becoming available in e-book version they could save your back from having to carry all those heavy books to class.

To start, here's what's missing from these lower priced tablets: 3G, bluetooth, GPS services and a camera. They're also a little smaller than a full sized tablet, having 7-inch screens, and limited or no access to the Android Market.

Amazon's tablet, the Kindle Fire, comes with a 1 Ghz dual core processor 512 MB of RAM. That's about the same as many of the better new smart phones these days, but a 7-inch touch screen boasting 169 pixel per inch resolution of up to 16.2 million colors will make for a much bigger game of Angry Birds. The storage capacity of the Fire is a bit limited, at only 8 GB, but Amazon's cloud services make storage less of an issue when connected to Wi-Fi. If you want to store movies and music for offline usage, though, it will fill up fast. It supports AAC, OGG, WAV, MP3, and MIDI sound formats; AZW, PRC, PDF, TXT, DOC and DOCX text files; and images formatted as PNG, JPEG, BMP and GIF. The battery lasts up to 8 hours of reading, or 7.5 hours of watching videos offline, and recharge completely in 4 hours.

The Fire comes with it's own proprietary Amazon Silk web browser and weighs less than a pound. Although it runs Android, it has no access to the Android Market. Amazon does have their own Market, though, adding more apps every day. Amazon includes a one month free subscription to their Prime service which includes free streaming movies and books plus free two day delivery for qualifying Amazon purchases, but costs $79 a year after that. Students are able to sign up for Prime for a year for free. The Fire retails for $199.

Barnes and Nobles' offering, the Nook, runs the same 1 Ghz dual core processor as the Fire, but comes with a full gigabyte of RAM, which means faster loading apps and better streaming video. In addition to double the RAM, the Nook also has double the storage space, with 16 GB and includes a micro SD slot for up to 32 GB of additional storage. This means up to six times as much room for music photos and videos, but videos must be uploaded via USB connection to a PC. Videos loaded via USB are supported with up to 1080p resolution. The Nook also comes with apps for streaming Pandora as well as Netflix (at a resolution of 720p) and Hulu for existing subscribers via Wi-Fi.

The web browser is Flash capable and the Nook offers limited access to Google's Android Market as well as over 2.5 million books online. EPUB and PDF formatted files can be loaded directly from PC, and the Nook also supports XLS, DOC, PPT, TXT, DOCM, XLSM, PPTM, PPSX, PPSM, DOCX, XLX, and PPTX documents. It also plays MP3, MP4, AAC, AMR, WAV and OGG files. The batteries last up to 11.5 hours reading, nine hours watching videos, and recharge in three hours. It weighs less than a pound and is selling for $249.

While neither tablet offers quite as many apps or games as the iPad or full priced Android tablets, for students wishing to keep track of class schedules, access ANGEL, carry thousands of books or watch the latest episode of "House" between classes, either tablet would make a great gift.