Samsung and B&N announce Galaxy Tab 4 Nook

Today Samsung and Barnes&Noble announced they will be partnering on the release of a new tablet. Dubbed Galaxy Tab 4 Nook, the slate will aim to bring new life to B&N's lineup of affordable slates, which hasn't seen new hardware in quite a while.

The hardware of the new tablet is identical to the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 7.0, which the Korean company announced in April. It comes with a 7" screen with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels, a 1.2GHz quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU and 1.5GB of RAM. The whole thing weighs just 276g and comes with a microSD card slot allowing you to expand the unconfirmed built-in storage (original Galaxy Tab 4 7.0 comes in 8GB and 16GB versions).

On the software side, the Galaxy Tab 4 Nook should be quite different from its vanilla sibling, running Nook's customized UI. That would mean you will get easy access to Barnes & Noble’s digital collection of more than three million books, magazines and newspapers, but it's likely that some of the core Android functionality will be restricted. Previous Nook tablets offered access to the Play Store and we are hoping that this won't change here.

The companies are expected to introduce Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook in the US in early August. Its price is yet to be confirmed, but we expect it will be lower than the $200 that the regular Galaxy Tab 4 7.0 costs.

Barnes&Noble assures us that the fact that it's offloading its tablet production to Samsung, won't mean that it will be abandoning its e-reader business too. The backlit Nook GlowLight will remain available, but now that the company has freed some resources, it will focus on improving the digital reading experience that its products provide.