• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, December 13, 2011

It’s on! As the holiday shopping season races to a conclusion, the reading device and tablet manufacturers are scrambling for position in any way they can. Before the Amazon Kindle Fire arrived last month, there was already an Android-powered tablet with training wheels in the market called the Nook Color. When Barnes & Noble rolled out its higher-end tablet, the Nook Table, last month, it moved the pricing and positioning of the Nook Color to the $199 middle of its pack. It's called a “reader’s tablet,” now.

But B&N is still pressing the features and affordability of the unit as it goes head to head with the Fire on price. Yesterday the bookseller started pushing out a major firmware update to the device.

The upgrade adds over 100 features and enhancements, not the least of which is the addition of Netflix. The device also gets Flixster, which gives access to the Blu-ray discs that offer Ultraviolet digital access to films you buy in disc form. The Nook Color now supports landscape.

The Nook Color has added a number of merchandising and content changes. Taking direct aim at Amazon’s infamous exclusive deal to bring DC comics graphic novels to the Fire, B&N has a deal with DC rival Marvel to be a featured provider for the new Nook Comics section. Other comics, including many from the Archie series, are part of the catalog now.

B&N is also stepping up the on-device merchandising of content, with daily deals, short “bite-sized” special e-books and exclusive content from authors in the form of a Nook First series.

Along with Amazon, B&N is vying for what we like to call that “just good enough” tablet experience that seems to be shared among the 7-inch color devices at the low end of the  market now. Netflix performance was acceptable, although jagged. The comics reader is poor by most tablet and even Amazon Fire standards. It pretty much reduces a graphic novel page to a fraction of its original scale and offers no intelligent zooming or frame-by-frame view that makes an app like Comixology compelling on the iPad.

As much as we have our complaints about the Amazon Fire, it is hard to see where the Nook Color competes at this price point with Amazon’s clearly more powerful alternative. The real fight seems to be between B&N’s more expensive Nook Tablet and the Fire.