Want more storage for your stuff? The Fire crushes B&N’s tablet
Read that headline again, because it’s the opposite of what you’ll hear over the next few days in coverage of the Kindle Fire versus the new NOOK Tablet.
I need to explain this one.
First, the NOOK Tablet has twice the onboard memory as the Fire (16GB versus 8GB). That, though, is just the hardware. That drive has to also hold the operating system, which is understandable.
Amazon says there are 6GB available for user content:
“8GB internal (approximately 6GB available for user content). That’s enough for 80 apps, plus 10 movies or 800 songs or 6,000 books.”
Okay, about 2GBs on the Fire goes for the operating system and such…that’s reasonable.
How about the NOOK Tablet?
B&N says:
“Approximately 13GB available to store content, of which up to 12GB may be reserved for content purchased from the Barnes & Noble NOOK Store.”
My headline says ‘YOUR stuff” (emphasis added), and that’s the key point.
Amazon gives you 6GB of storage for your content on the Kindle Fire.
Barnes & Noble gives you 1GB.
Fire: six times as much.
Amazon has never reserved onboard memory on a Kindle for Amazon purchased materials, to my knowledge. If you wanted to “sideload” a few audiobooks on there, books from Baen, your own music…you could fill up the memory.
Barnes & Noble is limiting how you use your local “hard drive”…we aren’t talking about the cloud here.
That sounded odd to me, so I asked someone at Barnes & Noble. I chatted with someone…while I was given a human name, I got a lot of canned responses…enough to make me suspect I was speaking with a database, although I don’t know that.
I got the exact same response twice…to two different questions.
Here’s an excerpt from the conversation:
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13:20:24 : Paul: My name is Paul, Thank you for joining Barnes & Noble chat. How are you doing today? How may I help you?
13:20:30 : : Sure. The new NOOK Tablet says: “Approximately 13GB available to store content, of which up to 12GB may be reserved for content purchased from the Barnes & Noble NOOK Store.” So, if I have 2GBs of personal files, I can not put them on the NOOK Tablet, correct?
13:20:37 : : Hi, Paul! 
13:21:06 : Paul: NOOK Tablet has 16GB of built-in memory lets you hold up to 10,000 books. You can add up to 32GB memory to your device with a microSD memory card.
13:21:11 : Paul: The actual formatted capacity may be less. Approximately 13GB available to store content, of which up to 12GB may be reserved for content purchased from the Barnes & Noble NOOK Store.
13:21:39 : : Yes, correct. So that means there is only 1 GB for material not purchased from the NOOK store, right?
13:22:46 : Paul: Yes, for the Personal sideload files.
===
I went on to ask about NOOK cloud storage.
The answer was clear: no personal document storage in the NOOK cloud.
Amazon gives you 5GBs free just for personal document storage for your Kindles.
That makes it 11GB possible for the Kindle, 1GB for the NOOK Tablet for personal documents.
I’d call that “crushing”. 
They both appear to give you unlimited cloud storage purchased from their respective stores.
Now, does that make the memory always better for the Fire?
Nope.
If you were going on a cruise, for example, and you were going to be away from wi-fi and a computer for a long time, you might want to carry a lot of information with you…and the NOOK tablet would give you that SD card in addition to the onboard storage.
If you brought a laptop with you, in addition to your Fire, you could sideload from that…using it like that SD card.
That’s nowhere near as convenient, though.
Still, the Kindle Fire gives you more storage for your personal stuff than the NOOK tablet does…but I don’t think you’ll hear that much.
Thanks to Becca for commenting on a previous post and nudging me along, and to D. Andersen in the Amazon Kindle community for bringing up the cruise example.
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
