Barnes & Noble, the largest retail bookseller in the US, has today announced that it’s teamed up with Samsung yet again to launch another Galaxy Tab with NOOK branding. This time we’re looking at a modified version of the 8-inch Galaxy Tab S2, which is now available to purchase in the United States for $399 from any of B&N’s brick-and-mortar stores or its website.
The device is almost identical to the original Galaxy Tab S2 — inside and out — but unlike its counterpart this one comes pre-loaded with NOOK’s standard suite of apps and an extremely simple custom user interface as opposed to Samsung’s TouchWiz UI. Users will also get complimentary access to Microsoft Office and a $5 voucher for the NOOK store.
According to Barnes and Noble the Galaxy Tab S2 NOOK is its third Android tablet to be fully optimised for reading. Its built-in software is primarily designed to give users instant access to media, such as books, magazines, videos and TV shows. Seeing as the device runs a custom build of Android 5.0 Lollipop, users also have the ability to take advantage of the Google Play Store to download apps, games and music.
In terms of specifications, the slate sports an 8-inch QXGA Super AMOLED display, a 64-bit Exynos 5433 octa-core processor with four cores running at 1.9GHz and the other four at 1.3GHz, 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM, 32GB internal storage (expandable up to 128GB via microSD), an 8MP rear-facing camera, a 2.1MP selfie shooter and a 5,870 mAh battery