The tablet market is a pretty cut throat place to be these days. On the high end Apple simply dominates with the iPad, on the middle ground Google’s new Nexus line carefully appeals to those with a strong sense of price vs. performance, and Amazon fills out the low end. This isn’t to say Amazon’s tablet offerings aren’t well spec’d, but simply put, they aren’t worth the investment if you aren’t willing to commit to Amazon’s content ecosystem. 
At this point, 
Your friendly neighborhood Target store is getting ready to give Amazon a brick-and-mortar sized wedgie as it tosses the e-tailer's entire Kindle line right out of its stores. Even Amazon's Kindle Fire, Target's top selling tablet device on Black Friday last year, will be extinguished from Target's chain of stores, and it appears it's all due to a conflict of interest with Barnes & Noble and its Nook line.
Print media hasn't fared super well in the face of digital distribution. Turns out, a lot of people prefer live pixels to dead trees. So what's a company like Barnes & Noble -- with serious cash invested in both brick-and-mortar stores and the digital Nook ecosystem -- supposed to do in this new era of reading? The answer, apparently, lies in spinning off the Nook into an entirely new subsidiary company -- and giving Microsoft a 17.6 percent stake in the fresh venture. B&N did just that this morning.
Barnes & Noble is going into the weekend having launched a new eBook reader that allows you to read scary stories under the covers at night without any third party accessories. It's the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, the first and only E-Ink based eBook reader that lets you read in the dark, B&N claims. The adjustable GlowLight is said to produce uniform light across the Nook's display, and will do so "without disturbing a sleepy spouse" the way reading with a light on does.
If you can’t beat Apple’s iPad, change the rules of the game. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are taking a bath on sales of the $199 Kindle Fire and the $249 Nook Tablet, respectively, and making up for it with profits on sales of electronic merchandise (e-books, videos, music, and apps). The strategy has succeeded in moving a lot of hardware, with each company on track to sell millions of units (although the ratio of Kindle Fire to Nook Tablet sales is greatly in Amazon’s favor so far). Both tablets feature nearly identical 7-inch, 1024x600 LCDs and rely on Wi-Fi for connectivity. Which should tempt you away from the high-end tablets? Only a bloody-knuckled deathmatch will tell.
Owners of the Kindle Fire were certainly fired up when Amazon disabled root access in the newest 
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