In Fire vs Nook: It's Fire by a nose

— -- Who doesn't appreciate a good old-fashion brawl every now and again? There may be no bigger slugfest than what is taking place this week in 7-inch touch-screen tablets as the Kindle Fire from Amazon goes toe-to-toe with the Nook Tablet from Barnes & Noble.

In one corner is Amazon, the Internet's leading retailer and champion of traditional E-Ink type electronic readers. In the other is Barnes & Noble, which despite its own online presence and lineup of e-readers is best known for its physical bookstores.

Behind the scenes, though, lurks tablet titleholder Apple, which has to take notice of this week's activities. Amazon is unleashing a body blow against the pricing status quo by introducing Fire at $199, $50 less than the Nook Tablet and, perhaps more important, $300 less than the Apple iPad 2.

Let me state upfront that neither the Fire nor Nook are as fully featured as the iPad 2 with its near 10-inch display. You won't find a camera on either device, which is only a big deal if you have designs on doing video chat. There's no Bluetooth or GPS either. Both Fire and Nook have far fewer apps than the iPad. The software isn't as fluid. And without 3G or 4G cellular, your connectivity options are limited to Wi-Fi.

Still, many buyers won't give a hoot about any of this — especially if what you have in mind for a tablet is reading (traditional strengths for Amazon and Barnes & Noble), music, movies, TV shows, browsing (including Adobe Flash sites) and playing casual games and checking e-mail. Despite some shortcomings I found both tablets appealing in my tests.

The fight between the companies largely comes down to which ecosystem you want to buy into because books you purchase from one provider are not compatible with the other. Amazon has a major advantage because of its vast digital offerings. Unlike its rival, Amazon has built-in music and movie stores, the latter providing 48-hour rentals along with sales options. If you subscribe to the $79 a year Amazon Prime service, you can freely stream more than 10,000 movies and TV shows and also borrow a Kindle book without due dates each month. Fire buyers can try Prime for free for a month. (As part of Prime, you also get two-day free shipping on products ordered through Amazon).

On Nook Tablet, Barnes & Noble is pushing available apps from the likes of Netflix, Hulu Plus and Pandora, but such apps are also available to Fire owners.

Where Barnes & Noble does have a bragging chip is in extra onboard storage—16 gigabytes versus 8GB. Plus, through a microSD slot, you can add up to 32GB extra on Nook Tablet. The advantage is meaningful to a point.

Amazon's counters that all the digital media you purchase through the company — apps, music, videos, and, of course, books— are held in the cloud for free. That's fine if you use Fire in a place that has Wi-Fi, but you'll have to make choices about what to download onto the device if you traveling and will be beyond reach of an Internet connection for an extended spell.

Still it was a pleasure to turn on Kindle Fire for the first time and have access to all the music I had previously stored on Amazon Cloud Drive, including songs that originally resided in iTunes.