Microsoft announced on Monday that it was investing $300 million in a partnership with Barnes & Noble to form a subsidiary dubbed "NewCo." The venture will house the bookseller's Nook products and higher-education business, and Barnes & Noble will reproduce the Nook's e-reader application and bookstore for Windows 8. Additionally, industry watchers speculate that in the next iteration of the Nook Tablet, Barnes & Noble will ditch its heavily modified version of the Android operating system in favor of Microsoft's highly-praised Windows 8 OS, a move that would further differentiate the 7-inch tablet from its primary competitor, Amazon's market-leading Kindle Fire. Could a $200, Windows-powered Nook Tablet be in the cards?
Don't hold your breath: Bringing Windows 8's beautifully designed interface to an underpowered 7-inch device won't be easy, says Jason Perlow at ZDNet. For starters, it would be difficult to retool and license Windows 8 while still selling the Nook at $199. More likely: The Nook Tablet will get "Apollo," the codename for the Windows Phone OS due out later this year, which isn't quite Windows 8. Maybe such a scaled-down slab could compete with the Kindle Fire, but even then, "we are probably looking at a six-to-eight-month, product-development-to-launch timeframe, at the bare minimum." Temper expectations accordingly.
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