[G Tablet General] glgehman:
In my experience

I own both the G-Tablet (Vegan 7-Ginger Experimental) and the Nook Color (Phiremod 4.1) both based on Cyanogen Mod 7 gingerbread cores. I love them both!

PLEASE read all that follows with the caveat that I am not a developer; although I have written PC software and device drivers going way back to the Commodore Amiga. I know a little about what is involved and, therefore, have only the highest praise for the hard work and creativity on display in the developer community for both these tablets!

Hardware Comparison

Putting it very simply: The G-Tablet is an awesome tablet computer with a netbook screen. I am perfectly fine with the screen (especially since custom roms have tweaked the refresh rate and frame rates). The Nook Color on the other hand has an awesome screen.

Each tab is a study in engineering compromise. How do you meet a given price-point? The G-Tab developers obviously chose to make the best computer they could by compromising on screens. (Putting an IPS screen on the G-Tablet would kick up the retail cost at least $200, which is one reason you see all the new tablets coming out above $600).

The Nook started out as a simple book reader, so they picked the best screen they could find and put just enough horsepower under it to drive a book reader - and very nicely, too. I sometimes think about flashing it back to stock, just to watch the lovely product intro again. All the same, it is significantly slower than the G-Tab. I find it entirely usable, and the Overclocking kernels now available make a huge difference. But that still leaves you with one core at 1.1 GHz vs. the G-Tab's dual core 1 GHz Tegra.

Ultimately, though, the main differentiator is size. I love my G-Tablet (10") for reading at home, particularly while lying down. But I take the Nook Color (7") with me everywhere I go. I find that comic books display slightly better on the G-Tab using ACV than they do on the Nook using the same program. And, of course, since both screens use the same pixel dimensions (1024 x 600), everything on the Nook Color is a lot smaller than it is on the G-Tab; a factor if you are gettng older and reading through corrective lenses.

Street Cred

If you are interested in impressing your friends and prosyletizing Apple fans, then the G-Tablet won't get you very far. It is hard to make anyone outside yourself enthusiastic about the G-Tab's screen. And that's mostly because they can't see what you are seeing unless you shove it directly into their line of vision.

The Nook Color impresses everyone who sees it. They also admire the cleverness of rooting a simple reader and turning it into something greater.

Although most people's frame of reference remains an iPad/iPhone and they don't appreciate the difference between that and a full-blown operating system (on either device). Any Android still suffers by comparison with iStuff when the frame of reference is drawn by Apple and the mainstream market.

Android Version Limitations

You still have to make a lot of choices based on features that are supported by the various versions of Android that are available ATM. If you require video playback and bulletproof Flash, then you probably want to stick with Eclair (nook) and Froyo (G-Tablet). These are the most stable platforms for multimedia.

Gingerbread, for me, is the best choice, since the keyboard input is much more accurate and the global copy/paste feature (with cursor positioning) are a requirement. I hate trying to correct what I mistyped in Froyo. But a lot of the essential hardware infrastructure isn't there yet for Gingerbread. The situation is changing even as I write this post, but as of today, there still is no hardware assist for video playback and you see it over and over in the forums: When is video coming? The answer is always the same: 'When there are hardware drivers that work.' And 'As soon as it's ready.'

There is working Honeycomb for the Nook Color. I tried it for a while, but found too many apps that didn't run correctly, so dropped back to Gingerbread. The G-Tablet devs haven't even attempted a port, since the Honeycomb codebase remains un-finalized.

Developer Status

Both G-Tablet Android Development forum and Nook Color Android Development forum here at XDA are remarkable resources, offering at least 3 seriously usable alternate roms for each device. The Nook crowd seems, to me, a bit more wooly and experimental, while the G-Tablet developers seem very tightly focused on a roadmap. But that's just my perception. I have no idea how they organize themselves.

Again, whichever platform, each user must decide which trade-offs you are willing to make for stability, feature set, speed and bleeding-edgeness. I initially got the Nook Color because I had the G-Tab tricked out just fine and didn't want to change it; but still wished for a toy to flash experimentals on. At $250, the Nook was a perfect solution; and really every bit as awesome as a Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Hope this long-winded post has something useful for you.

glg