Barnes and Noble abandoned making their own tablets in 2013 and forged a relationship with Samsung to rebrand their devices. The Samsung for Nook line has been sold in all 600 bookselling locations for the last three years and it now looks like B&N wants more control over the hardware and it looks like they are back in the tablet game, designing their own devices.
According to FCC documents B&N has just developed a new seven inch Nook branded tablet that is designed to compete against the $50 Amazon Fire.
Here is what we know the hardware will have
- MediaTek MT8163 quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor with Mali-T720 MP2 graphics
- 3000, 11.1 Wh mAh battery
- 802.11a/b/g/n dual-band WiFi
- Bluetooth 4.0
- Front and rear cameras
- Mono speaker and 3.5mm headset jack
- Micro USB prot
- microSD card slot
The new Nook tablet will have full access to the Google Play Store, since B&N shuttered their own app store earlier this year. It will also have the same type of e-reading apps that have been pre-loaded on the Samsung tablets, users will be able to use Nook Readouts, have access to their cloud library and read all of their e-books and magazines.
I think the main reasons why B&N is resurrecting their hardware is because Samsung does not make really cheap tablets and this forced the nation’s largest bookseller to develop their own. This is a great move on their part and this new device should be hitting retail shelves sometime in the next month or two.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
