14 DAY TRIAL // Barnes & Noble NOOK tablet division has been through ups and down, mostly downs as of late. At some point, it was even rumored that the company has fired the entire NOOK hardware team, a report which later proved to be inaccurate.
But back in June, Barnes & Noble was revealed to have partnered up with Korean tech giant Samsung in order to produce co-branded Galaxy Tab 4 tablets.
Now the folks over at CNET are reporting that Samsung is getting ready to host another event in New York (like the one from two months ago that saw the advent of the Galaxy Tab S family) which has been scheduled for August 20.
The event will take place at the Barnes & Noble in New York’s Union Square neighborhood, and the invite reads “Join us as the best of both worlds come together,” so what we’re going to see be unveiled is pretty obvious.
Of course, we’re talking about the very first Galaxy Tab 4 Nook to be coming with a 7-inch display. After the launch event, the device will be made available for purchase during the same month.
Back in February, the rumor mill said that Barnes & Nobles was working on next-gen NOOK Color tablets, which were set to arrive “soon.” Soon turned to never and to this day we haven’t seen or heard anything about such products.
The company continues to offer its Nook GlowLight in the US and it launched the backlit E-Ink eReader in the UK in recent days, but no new hardware will be coming out of the B&N gateway in the future.
It appears quite clear that in this partnership, B&N is leaving Samsung to tackle the hardware part, while it focuses on providing better content.
Despite providing affordable, decent eReaders and tablets, B&N has proved unable to compete with similar offerings like the Amazon Kindles and Kobo products.
As for Samsung, the upcoming weeks are going to be busy for the tech giant. The company has already started sending out invites for its latest Unpacked event, which will take place a few weeks before IFA 2014 kick starts in Berlin.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 7.0 is a tablet arriving with an LCD display boasting 1280 x 800 pixel resolution and drawing life from 1.2GHz quad-core CPU. The NOOK-branded tablets will most likely arrive with similar specs but will offer specific pre-loaded content that will appeal to digital book lovers.
While we’re waiting for the Galaxy Tab 4 Nook announcement, you can ahead and check out our review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 7.0 to get an idea of what the device brings.
