Barnes & Noble To Target Amazon Kindle Fire With 8GB Nook Tablet?

Leading brick and mortar bookseller Barnes & Noble could be on the verge of releasing a cheaper, 8GB version of its Nook tablet as early as Wednesday with Walmart being enlisted as a launch partner.

Tech website the Verge reports that a leaked internal document it obtained details the launch plans which would add another stock keeping unit below the 16GB model currently on sale.

The tablet costs $249, which is $50 more than the Amazon Kindle Fire, more than enough to sway prospective customers evaluating both tablets.

The Nook tablet still carries some additional features compared to the Fire; for a start, it has twice the onboard memory (1GB RAM) and a microSD card slot.

While it is possible to get the existing Nook tablet for $199 via Ebay in the US, it would make sense for Barnes & Noble to release a cut-down version of the Nook without the two above improvements.

Both the Kindle Fire and the Nook come with a 1GHz TI OMAP4430 processor, a 7-inch capacitive touchscreen with a 1024 x 600 pixels resolution and run on customised versions of Android 2.3 Gingerbread.