A frustrating quirk of the new Nook Tablet has been uncovered. It seems that of the 16GB of internal memory on the device ,only 1GB is freely available to users. This means anything you don’t download directly through Barnes and Noble or one of the devices approved apps is limited to being stored on a total of 1GB on the device.
This limitation of the soon to be released Nook Tablet was originally discovered by Maximum PC but Barnes and Noble has since confirmed that information. Barnes and Noble detailed that three gigs were set aside for the Android OS, and another 12 gigs can only be used for Barnes and Noble content or content from approved apps. If you want to put your own music, movies, or photos on the device you’ll only have 1GB to work with.
Barnes and Noble defended this limitation by stating that it was to prevent confusion among users. If a user loads up their tablet with a bunch of their own movies or music, they may run into trouble installing apps or buying books & magazines from Barnes and Noble. What a ridiculous justification. If a user is savvy enough to side load their own apps, or push their own music/movies/docs/etc onto the device, then surely they are smart enough to manage that content when they run into capacity trouble.
It’s worth noting that the Nook Tablet does have a microSD slot, so more storage could be added to the device, but that would require the consumer to shell out even more money when there is a perfectly usable amount of space already on board the tablet.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire may not be a perfect tablet solution but at least it allows owners to make use of the internal 8GB of storage any way they see fit. Hopefully Barnes and Noble will fix this annoyance with a software update in the future. I'd wager that the option to root the tablet and just install your own version of Android will be available soon enough as well. With a custom-loaded OS and/or a rooted device, you could do whatever you please with all that internal storage.
Let us know what you think of this memory usage restriction in the comments.
