New 8.7″ Nook Reading Tablet Getting Released on March 17th

Last week Barnes and Noble announced the upcoming release of a new Nook Reading Tablet that’s once again being made by Lenovo, and it’s getting released on March 17th, according to B&N’s website.

B&N is calling it the Nook Reading Tablet 8.7, and it’s available in two colors, Seafoam Green and Luna Grey. Both are currently available to pre-order from B&N’s website, and the price is set at $149.99, but B&N Premium Members can get an extra 10% off.

This new Nook Reading Tablet appears to be the same as the Lenovo Tab One minus the Nook branding, which is being sold on Amazon for $129. It has a decent rating with 4.3-stars overall, and most people seem to be happy with it.

The specs seem to be the same on the Nook version, but in typical B&N fashion they don’t list the screen resolution anywhere. If the Nook version has the same screen as the Lenovo Tab One then it would have a 1340 x 800 resolution, which equates to 179 ppi. That’s slightly higher than the previous Lenovo Nook Tablet, which had a 9″ screen with the same resolution for 173 ppi.

The Nook version runs Android 15 out of the box, whereas it sounds like the Lenovo Tab One comes with Android 14 and it updates to Android 15.

The Nook Reading Tablet is a budget device with unremarkable specs, but it should be fine for a reading tablet. It has an octa-core MediaTek Helio G85 CPU, 64GB of internal storage, 4GB of RAM, and there’s a microSD card slot (the press release says it supports cards up to 128GB, but the website says 1TB—it’s likely the latter).

It also sports front (2MP) and rear (8MP) cameras, it has dual speakers, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a USB-C port, it supports Bluetooth 5.1 and dual-band WiFi. The battery size is 5100mAh, and battery life is rated at up to 16.5 hours for reading and 12.5 hours for YouTube streaming.

One thing B&N’s website says is it has a grayscale reading mode for B&W, and a chromatic reading mode for color content. That’s not something I see mentioned with the regular Lenovo Tab One, but maybe it has that too.

Another interesting detail from the press release, here’s the following quote: “Keep an eye out for more new announcements from NOOK in the coming months!” It sounds like more new Nooks are coming soon, but we already expected as much since they said that last year.