Barnes & Noble takes on Amazon, Apple with tablet

US bookseller Barnes & Noble unveiled a tablet computer on Monday in a bid to take on Apple's iPad and an upcoming device from digital book-selling rival Amazon. The Nook Tablet will cost $249 -- $50 more than than the Kindle Fire from Amazon which goes on sale on November 15 but $250 less than the cheapest iPad. Amazon and Barnes & Noble were among the first companies to sell electronic book readers and both are now staking a claim to the tablet market which has been dominated by the iPad. The Nook Tablet will allow users to surf the Web using Wi-Fi connectivity, do email, watch TV shows and movies and listen to music in addition to serving as an e-book reader. Barnes & Nobel's online bookstore offers more than 2.5 million titles. The Nook Tablet comes with a number of pre-loaded applications including Netflix, Hulu Plus and Pandora. It has a seven-inch (17.8-centimeter) color screen like the Kindle Fire. The iPad has a 9.7-inch (24.6-cm) screen. The Nook Tablet has 16 gigabytes of memory and Barnes & Noble said its battery life enables 11.5 hours of reading or nine hours of video viewing. The device will go on sale in Barnes & Noble's 700 US stores on November 17. Barnes & Noble also announced Monday it was cutting the price of its cheapest e-reader, the Nook Simple Touch, to $99. Amazon's cheapest Kindle costs $79. Sarah Rotman Epps of technology research firm Forrester gave the Nook Tablet a rave review and said Barnes & Noble could sell 1.5 million to two million of the devices over the holiday season. "Still, Barnes & Noble is David taking on not one but two Goliaths: B&N's market cap is just $700 million, compared with $100 billion for Amazon and $370 billion for Apple," she said. Rotman Epps said she expected Amazon to sell up to four million Kindle Fires over the holiday and for Apple to move 20 million iPads in the fourth quarter. Barnes & Noble shares were down 2.07 percent at $11.37 in late trading on Wall Street while Amazon shares were up 0.15 percent at $216.81.