Samsung has officially announced that its newly launched mid-range tablet, the Galaxy Tab A, will be available for purchase in the UK from May 21st onwards. While the tablet was launched in Russia a few weeks back in two different screen sizes, the UK will only see the larger 9.7 inch variant for now. There’s no word thus far about when the smaller 8 inch variant will be introduced. Both the Wi-Fi and the LTE editions are reportedly slated to be launched alongside a third variant that will come with a stylus (the S-Pen).
The 3 variants of the tablet that are about to be launched, share fairly similar specifications apart from the connectivity options and RAM. All the variants come with 9.7 inch screens as mentioned above, and measure 166.8 x 242.5 x 7.5 mm with a resolution of 1024 x 768, which gives them a 4:3 aspect ratio, like the Nexus 9. Each device is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 SoC, with the LTE variant sporting the MSM8916. The Wi-Fi only variants (including the one with the S-Pen) feature only 1.5 GB of RAM, whereas the LTE variant features a full 2 GB. All the models carry 16 GB of internal storage and support microSD cards upto 128 GB. There’s a 5 megapixel camera on the back and a 2 megapixel camera on the front of the devices. All the variants come with support for Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n) and Wi-Fi Direct along with Bluetooth 4.1. The battery is rated at 6,000 mAh and the tablets come with Android 5.0 Lollipop pre-installed with Samsung’s proprietary TouchWiz interface laid on top.
There is no word on the possible pricing of these devices, and Samsung is only expected to make that information public on the day of the launch. However, reports do say, that in an effort to make the tablet more lucrative, Samsung is bundling a few goodies for the buyers, including 115 GB of cloud storage on Microsoft OneDrive for free, along with The Economist and Kindle for Samsung apps. Skype and MS Office for Android also come pre-installed on all the models.