Barnes & Noble’s Nook gets a new Lenovo-built tablet

For years, the news of Barnes & Noble’s Nook line of e-readers and Android tablets being discontinued has surfaced again and again, but somehowBrand-Which-could face its own death with new hardware bringing it back from the brink of extinction. Today, that comes in the form of a new 10-inch Nook tablet courtesy of Lenovo.

There is good reason to repeatedly believe that Barnes & Noble has discontinued its Nook line, including the simple fact that its E Ink-based devices and more capable tablets are sold out online and have been very difficult to find in stores lately. But Barnes & Noble’s senior director for Nook operations, Susan McCulloch, told me The edge yesterday that the low inventory is actually the result of strong demand and sales of its e-readers as a result of everyone being stuck at home during the pandemic.

That will soon change for dedicated Nook users, as a new Nook 10-inch tablet, designed in collaboration with Lenovo, will be available in early April with an all-metal body and an “85 percent screen-to-body ratio”. Powered by an octa-core processor “with a main frequency of up to 2.3 GHz”, the new Nook actually has a 10.1-inch HD IPS touchscreen, while the built-in 32 GB storage can be further expanded with a microSD card. The battery life is promised to “10 hours of web browsing, ”which means that if you stream video instead, you won’t get anything the same battery life between charges. The new Nook also comes with Bluetooth connectivity, an FM radio, and front and rear cameras, so it can be used for more than just a media consuming device.

While it has a custom Barnes & Noble front end that runs on top of Android, the new Nook can still access the Google Play Store. Thus, users can choose to get their content from the Barnes & Noble app or download books from other sellers such as Amazon or Rakuten through the Kindle and Kobo apps. With a price tag of $ 130, the new Nook sounds like another well-priced and most importantly capable Android tablet, but more importantly, it puts the Nook brand back on life support for at least a few more years.