Remember how the Nook Tablet will only let you use 1 GB of storage out of its 16 GB internal storage for your personal items, reserving the rest for B&N store-bought content? With the early Nook Color, Barnes & Noble found that people were filling up internal space with their own things and not having enough room left over for stuff they purchased from B&N, so they made the change starting with later shipments of the original Nook Color tablet. But that seems to be changing back now.
Perhaps B&N has found that the average device doesn’t need that much room for B&N content, or perhaps a number of owners complained. Regardless, the important thing is that B&N has changed its mind about the lockdown, at least to some extent. Engadget reports that the new 8GB version of the tablet only restricts 1GB for B&N content.
Furthermore, a footnote on B&N’s Nook page now explains that the 16GB Nook Tablet offers:
13GB for content, of which 12GB is reserved for NOOK Store content. If you want additional memory for personal content, you may use a microSD card of up to 32GB. If you want to re-configure the internal memory of your NOOK Tablet-16GB for additional personal storage, you need to visit your local Barnes & Noble on or after 3/12/12 for help in doing so.
It isn’t clear what the limitations on this reconfiguration are—whether you still must reserve 1 GB for B&N content, or whether you’ll be able to get one of the restricted Nook Colors reconfigured also. Still, it’s good B&N is recognizing that people want to have fewer restrictions on what they can do with their tablets’ internal storage, even if they could just add a flash memory card to get more.
Interesting that the change requires taking the tablet in to a B&N store. Shows one of the benefits B&N has over Amazon in that they have these physical locations where things like that can be done without having to ship it somewhere. Of course, if it can be done in the store, hackers will undoubtedly soon figure out how to do it outside the store too.