Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle Fire could very well be the must have product for this year’s holiday season. Amazon has seemingly created the perfect tablet to attract a large number of consumers with high performance and a reasonable price. However, on a week that consumers were anticipating the Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble (BKS) shook up the market and released a low priced high performance tablet of its own, the Nook tablet.

In recent years there has been two types of tablets; there were high performance high demand products such as the Samsung Galaxy and the Apple iPad which can price over $500 and then there is low priced low performance tablets that are generic knockoffs priced below $200. However, there has never been a tablet that’s combined the high performance of the more expensive products and the cheap price of the low performance models. Amazon accomplished this feat and at a price of $199 consumers, investors, and the company can rest assure that it will be a bestselling success. And although I don’t believe that Nook sales will outperform the Kindle — I argue that it should.

Last week I purchased a Nook tablet for the sole purpose of comparing it to the Kindle Fire, which I’d preordered last month. I have taken the time to explore and compare both products to determine which tablet I believe is better. Both products have a good design; the Kindle Fire is similar to the BlackBerry Playbook showing no distinct difference to other tablets in the market, which all look similar. The Nook, however, is a one of a kind tablet with a distinct appearance that is slightly larger yet much thinner than the Kindle Fire. Both tablets run off the Android operating system, both have beautiful color, and both are easy to operate. And although there are many similarities between the two products there are also differences, and after taking some time to explore both products I believe the Nook is the better product.

Even though both products have some of the same features such as a 1GHz dual-core processor I have found that the Nook has several additional features that give it the slight edge. The Nook has 1GB of RAM compared to the Fires 512mb and approximately half the amount of storage space, at 8 gigs. The biggest distinction between the two is that on a side-by-side comparison of speed the Nook can upload data much faster than the Kindle, and reacts to commands faster as well. And since one of the primary functions of the two products is reading I believe the Nook has a few advantages that may benefit the consumer. Both have industry leading picture however, the Nook comes with HD and is slightly brighter making it easier to read than the Kindle, which benefits the consumer using the tablet as an eReader. The ability to load and read on both products is what separates these two products from any other in the market. Yet the Nook added one more feature to improve the reading experience of its users, that separates it from the competitors, and that’s a voice recognition feature. With the Nook, the user can read a book aloud and it will record the words and can be played back with the book. This is a great feature to use with children, as a way that parents can record themselves reading a book and simply play-it-back to their children.

The Nook is faster and has better color but is $50 more expensive than the Kindle Fire. There are advantages and disadvantages to both products but overall I believe that both are great tablets. Both will give the consumer a high performance device at a reasonable price and creates more value for performance compared to the industry leading iPad and Galaxy tablets. And although I personally believe the Nook tablet is a better product I doubt it will sell near as many units.

During the last 12 months Amazon has reported revenue of $43.59 billion compared to Barnes & Noble’s $7.02 billion. Amazon is a fast growing company with revenue that’s increased 27% compared to its full year in 2010 while Barnes & Noble has remained near the same. Amazon’s market share is much larger than Barnes & Noble, therefore I expect it to sell the tablet with much higher volume. In my opinion the Nook is a better tablet and is still priced relatively low. Yet because of Amazon’s size and incredible growth the Kindle Fire will most likely be known as the must have product of the holiday season while the Nook Tablet will be known as the best product that no one ever bought.