14 DAY TRIAL // Barnes & Noble's 7-inch Nook Tablet isn't officially scheduled to go on sale until November 18, but not to be outdone by Amazon, the outfit has apparently started shipping a few of these tablets to select stores.
Some lucky customers have already posted messages on Twitter according to Liliputing, which seem to suggest that the Nook Tablet is available right now at least for some of the users who have placed pre-orders for the device.
As a further proof of these claims, engadget has received the picture of a receipt for the B&N tablet that is dated November 14.
The Nook Tablet was made official just the last week and it looks remarkably similar with the previous Nook Color as the two share the same chassis and 7-inch VividView IPS color touchpanel with a 1024 x 600 screen resolution.
On the inside however, B&N has brought a lot of changes to its new device which drops the 800MHz single-core TI OMAP 3621 processor of its predecessor for a 1.2GHz dual-core OMAP4 SoC seconded by 1GB of memory.
That's more than double the compute capacity of the Nook Color, while also featuring 16GB on-board storage which can also be upgraded via a micro-SD card slot.
The rest of the specifications seem to be pretty much the same, but the Nook tablet gets some improved media capabilities as well as a .9 ounces lighter and .02 inches thinner chassis.
The new multimedia enhancements include support for 1080p video decoding, while B&N's creation also comes pre-installed with a series of apps such as Netflix, Hulu Plus, Rhapsody, MOG, and Grooveshark.
Pricing is set at $249 (180 EUR) in the US, which makes it $50 (36 EUR) more expensive than its nearest rival, the Amazon Kindle Fire which has just started shipping yesterday.