Nook Tablet No Threat To iPad, Say Analysts

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Yesterday, our own Robert Nelson brought you the word on the Nook Tablet’s official launch. And now, the word is coming out from several analysts suggesting what we actually suggested back in September with the Kindle Fire’s appearance from Amazon: neither the Kindle Fire nor the Nook Tablet will make Apple’s iPad lose much ground.

Basically, the word across the analyst community, represented here by both Tom Mainelli of IDC and Forrester Research’s Sarah Rotman Epps, says that the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet aren’t going to take a whole lot of ground away from the iPad line. Basically, what both said was that the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet would essentially open up the market to people who were interested in a tablet, but weren’t quite interested enough to pull the trigger on an iPad 2 that would cost almost as much as a full laptop might.

Current estimates say that the Nook Tablet may sell as many as two million units’ worth by the end of the year, whilst the Kindle Fire, which has been out a little longer, may pull between three and five million units sold. But the iPad 2, meanwhile, may sell as many as twenty million units worth if the current rate of sales holds up. And even a quarter of that number, as the Kindle Fire is showing, is a viable business’ worth of sales.

This is actually on par with our own suggestions last September, saying that the Kindle Fire would be able to hold its own–producing fully a quarter of the sales of the iPad 2–not because it’s superior to the iPad 2, but rather, because it’s different. With many tablets, you have to make a choice. There’s no big reason, for example, to own both a Samsung Galaxy Tab and an iPad 2. But with the Kindle Fire or the Nook Tablet, you can successfully own and operate both one of these and an iPad 2 because they serve different purposes. The Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire are more entertainment devices, geared toward accessing their respective storefronts’ worth of media, while the iPad 2 is much more the productivity machine. Granted, you can use it for gaming and such–many people have–but making an iPad 2 work with Amazon or Barnes and Noble would be a much tougher fight than the integrated Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet.

So what do you guys think here? Are the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet complementary to the iPad 2 as a growing amount of analysis suggests? Or do you think they’re competitors? If so, which do you favor? Head on down to the comments section and tell us what you think!