Barnes & Noble may have had strong enough sales of the Nook Color to make itself table player, suppliers argued on Monday to the Digitmes. The company has reportedly shipped three million since it launched the fall, one million of which shipped in the last few weeks of the year. Demand was reportedly such that it hit 600,000 to 700,000 of the LCD e-readers each month in January and February, per the Digitimes story.
The share would give it about 50 percent of the “tablet” market, the tipsters said, . Officially, Apple shipped about 7.5 million iPads worldwide in the fall, but it hasn’t said how many of these were sold in the US.
Barnes & Noble hasn’t ever officially reported Nook Color sales but did say it was its top-selling product during the holidays.
The company has taken to partly acknowledging the tablet-like role and is planning an Android 2.2 upgrade in April that will add e-mail, support for some apps, and Flash support on the web.
