We'd been wondering how Barnes & Noble would respond to the $199 Amazon Kindle Fire at its Nook event next week, and thanks to a very prolific tipster, it looks like we have an answer: the $249 Nook Tablet. Externally it looks like a slightly thinner and lighter Nook Color, but the real action is on the inside, where there's a faster 1.2GHz dual-core TI OMAP4 processor and 1GB of RAM, as well as 16GB of built-in memory with an expansion port. That's just a hair faster than the Kindle Fire, but what really matters on a tablet like this is access to content, and B&N apparently thinks they have it covered, boasting of two million books, "thousands" of apps, and HD videos and TV shows from Netflix and Hulu Plus. Interestingly, B&N also seems to be taking direct aim at Amazon's Silk cloud-accelerated browser, with one slide noting that the Nook's browser "isn't monitored." Cheeky.