Nook Tablet reserves only 1GB of space for non-B&N content

Spider

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By Rachel King | November 16, 2011, 11:30am PST

Summary: Although the Nook Tablet only offers 1GB of onboard space for non-Barnes & Noble purchases, that actually might not be too concerning.

One of the biggest selling points for the Nook Tablet is the surely the amount of storage space that it offers in comparison to the Kindle Fire.
Barnes & Noble’s offering has 16GB of onboard memory with a microSD card slot that can handle up to 32GB more, while the Kindle Fire only has 8GB of onboard memory while Amazon relies heavily on the cloud.
See also: Nook Tablet ships with ‘big order volume’ but lacks numbers
But there’s a curious catch to the Nook Tablet that was spotted upon launch time: the Nook Tablet only reserves 1GB of space for all content that doesn’t come through Barnes & Noble.
After speaking with Barnes & Noble reps directly, here’s the basic breakdown:

  • The Nook Tablet has 16GB of total storage space.
  • Approximately 3GB are reserved for the operating system and such, leaving 13GB leftover for the user.
  • Thus, 12GB is reserved for all content that comes from B&N’s digital store, meaning books, magazines and apps — at least for the time being.
  • 1GB can be for anything else the user wants to add (i.e. music, PDFs, etc.).
Much like Amazon is trying to do with the Kindle Fire, B&N is also using the Nook Tablet (maybe to a lesser extent) as a tool to draw consumers into its ecosystem.
To B&N’s credit, there’s a lot that a user could potentially consume from B&N’s digital stores alone. Apps can sometimes take up to several hundred megabytes of space or more, and many children’s books (one area where B&N really beats the competition right now) are deeply interactive with audio, video and animation — thus taking up huge amounts of space. The same goes for some other B&N titles, notably cookbooks.

As an iPad owner as well, I know that magazines can take up a lot of room — more than I would care to give away — depending on the quality of the layouts.
At first, I was kind of blown away and disappointed by the 1GB factor. If you want to store anything beyond this, you’ll need to pay for a microSD card. Those aren’t that cheap either, typically costing between $30 to $50, which you might as well get anyway if you want to download a lot of digital entertainment content. That might be hard for some consumers to grapple with as the Nook Tablet itself already starts at $249.

But potential customers should know that B&N is planning to roll out a video service of its own next year, which will include rentals that can be downloaded to the Nook Tablet. Because these videos will come through an app, that multimedia will go to the B&N portion (meaning the 12GB side) of the storage space.
Thus, that taken into account with other apps might mean that the 12GB could fill up more quickly with B&N content than one could realize.
 

J515OP

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Not too concerning at all the B&N space is already accessible for third party apps, including Amazon App Store apps :) The over all space is decent but will fill up quickly as mentioned. Good thing there is an SD card slot :D
 

patruns

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I have heard that some have been able to go to the local B&N and get that partition scheme changed.
 

J515OP

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I have heard that some have been able to go to the local B&N and get that partition scheme changed.

Yes and they rode their unicorns there to do it ;) Unfortunately this one is just a rumor at least at the majority of B&N locations they have no idea about this.
 

Desertrat1947

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Hi, First post. I just came back from the B&N. They re-partioned the tablet so I ended up with about 5gb for B&N and 7 for side loading. All existing side loads are deleted when this is done.I am reloading the sideloads and they seem to work ok.
 

tonyp

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Desertrat, please post a pic from like Root Explorer or something other app which will show the partitions and size of each. Did you get a good look at what the B&N tech did?
 
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J515OP

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Hi, First post. I just came back from the B&N. They re-partioned the tablet so I ended up with about 5gb for B&N and 7 for side loading. All existing side loads are deleted when this is done.I am reloading the sideloads and they seem to work ok.

This is awesome. Did they seem like it was sort of a common place thing to do or did they have to get the one special tech guru on the staff to even figure out what you were talking about? The early rumors were they could do this but after some people checked around they found that B&N stores had no idea what they were talking about (even though this is supposed to already be pretty common place among the Nook Color).

More than likely it was just new launch confusion but I have been waiting to hear of a confirmation that it can actually be done. It is really great if they know what to do and can do it but not the end of the world if they don't since root can get around most of the space issue (although it is less convenient).
 
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