Teardown: Nook Tablet

But instead of cutting into tension -- which we're pretty sure wasn't physically possible -- we focused on carving into every cranny of the new Nook, which we've found to share a lot in common with its fiery foe. Not going to lie: the Nook Tablet was a tad tricky to get into. Anyone wanting to embark on this adventure will need to gear up with both metal and plastic spudgers, plastic opening tools, a Torx T5 screwdriver, and an extra ounce of patience. Loads of adhesive, a fair number of screws, and a perplexing internal design guarantees some frustrating situations. Even though the Nook Tablet is almost as simple feature-wise as the Fire, it turned out to be much more difficult to get into; so a middle-of-the-road 6 out of 10 repairability score was definitely appropriate.

With zoom function. / © iFixit

Highlights: The Nook has its microSD slot stashed away under a magnetic cover next to the carabiner clip. This could make changing your SD card while rock climbing a bit difficult if you're using the Nook as a tie point. The two small circles flanking the microSD slot may look like harmless aesthetic pieces, or even buttons, but they actually house insidious screws that will hamper your disassembly efforts. Just as we thought, the rounded sides of the Nook are deceptive. Even though it looks skinnier than the Fire, it's actually a hair pudgier. The Fire measures in at .45", but the Nook is .03 inches thicker, at a mind-blowing .48"! Holy smokes! The Nook's 1 GB of RAM easily conquers its rivals' (Fire and iPad 2) 512 MB offerings, but we feel that's a pretty small victory -- more RAM does not necessarily translate to more performance. The 3.7 V, 4000 mAh battery provides an advertised 11.5 hours of use time, which easily beats the Kindle Fire's 8 hours. A little wiggling and out comes the motherboard. Let's see who we're dealing with: - SanDisk SDIN5C1-16G 16 GB Flash Memory - Texas Instruments 6030B107 Fully Integrated Power Management IC - Texas Instruments AIC3100 Low-Power Audio Codec With 1.3 W Stereo Class-D Speaker Amplifier - Texas Instruments LVDS83B FlatLink 10-135 MHz Transmitter - Hynix H9TKNNN8P 1 GB DDR2 RAM - The Hynix chip likely covers the Texas Instruments OMAP4 1 GHz dual-core processor, just like in the Kindle Fire. A closer look at one of the ribbon cables reveals a FocalTech FT5406EE8 Capacitive Touch Panel Controller. Ready for more shocking similarities to the Kindle Fire? The Nook Tablet's 7" IPS display also runs at a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels and produces the same 16 million colors. Unreal! ----- always, more can be found here.