Nook tablets adopt full Android OS

Better than a price cut or even extra RAM or processing speed, Barnes & Noble have just made their range of well-built tablets even more attractive to potential customers. They can now directly access Google Play, rather than the walled garden of the company's own apps ecosystem.

Like its closest direct competitor, Amazon, Barnes & Noble's Nook HD and Nook HD+ tablets run a slight variation on pure Q88 Android Tablet , meaning that owners only had access to NOOK apps and NOOK multimedia content. And, like Amazon's Kindle Fire HD slates, the NOOK range were very competitively priced, to the point where they were probably being sold at cost, in order to stimulate sales of e-books and videos.

As of Friday, an over-the-air software update will enable all existing NOOK HD and HD+ devices to access the Google Play app store and therefore access 700,000 apps that other Android tablet owners take for granted. However, the software update will not be pushed out to the Nook Color and Nook Tablet or to its range of e-readers.

The update won't affect the devices' look and feel; all that will change is that the tablets will now have access to native app versions of Gmail and YouTube,Q88 Tablet be able to run the Chrome web browser and will still be able to access the NOOK app store for e-books and other multimedia content.dsDSSD43F

Priced at $199 with 8GB of onboard memory, the NOOK HD boasts a full HD seven-inch display while the NOOK HD+, at $70 more offers a 9-inch HD display and 16GB of memory as standard. They were originally priced to compete with Amazon, but now that they're full Android tablets, they are priced to compete with anything that Samsung, Asus or Sony has to offer too. Simply put, two good niche tablets have just become two great mainstream tablets.

In the future BOXCHIP Android Tablet, you won’t need a Blu-ray player anymore, and you probably won’t need a TV tuner. The company showcased a 4K TV – the next generation in HD – running off of a tablet with 7.1 sound. That’s a center speaker in front of you, along with two speakers for stereo facing you, two speakers beside you, and two speakers behind you. A single tablet fed the entire system. But Qualcomm is also working with the cellular carriers like Verizon to broadcast live TV over cellular networks. This would allow large numbers of users to watch the same show, all using the same video stream and sharing the same signal, both providing real-time HD TV and preserving the wireless network.