Looking for a perfect e-reader tablet this holiday season but you've been underwhelmed by the offerings?

Barnes & Noble is getting ready to introduce a new player to its line of Nook e-readers, the seven-inch Nook Tablet. The new $249 device will be available in stores and online at the end of the week, but it's available for pre-order now. It will also be carried in some retail stores like Best Buy, Staples (News - Alert), Wal-Mart, Target, Office Max, Radio Shack, Fry's, PC Richards, and more, reports PC Mag.

And if you've been hankering after a previous model of the Nook but waiting for the prices to drop, now's the time: Barnes & Noble also announced that it's dropping the price of its color Nook from $249 to $199 in time for the holiday shopping season. The price on the Nook Simple Touch has also dropped from $139 to $99.

The new WiFi (News - Alert)-enabled Nook Tablet, which weighs under one pound, boasts a 1-GHz processor and one GB of built-in RAM. It also includes 16 GB of storage, expandable to 32 GB. Barnes & Noble says this will make the device “super responsive” for reading, streaming movies, and more.

Users can also store their data also via Nook Cloud, the company's online storage service. The company is also touting the device's long battery life: it offers nine hours of video, or five full-length HD movies on a single charge, says Barnes & Noble, and 11.5 hours of e-book reading.

Owners of Nook Tablets will be able to get free WiFi access in Barnes & Nobles stores, and via AT&T's (News - Alert) 26,000 nationwide hotspots.

While the nation awaits Amazon's Kindle Fire device, Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch says his company's tablet is the better device. During a New York press event announcing the new Nook Tablet, Lynch opined, “It's hands-down the best media tablet in the seven-inch class.”

Lynch says the Nook Tablet will have the better display and more memory than the Kindle Fire.

“The Kindle Fire is deficient for a media tablet,” said Lynch bluntly. “It can fit three movies and a year's worth of subscriptions to one magazine before running out of storage.”