A recent discount on the Samsung Galaxy Tab by Best Buy has prompted rumors that the second installment in the device line could be right around the corner. The discount is specifically for the Galaxy Tab A, which came out three months ago, and it takes $30 off the price of the device.
Samsung have recently released their two variants of the Galaxy Tab A, with an 8 and 9.7 inch display respectively, and a quad-core Snapdragon 410 processor with 1.5 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage memory. On the back of the device, a 5-megapixel camera offers a somewhat good picture quality, and the 2-megapixel one on the front should be sufficient for selfies.
According to reports however, the tablet has been struggling with its sales somewhat, and Samsung have had to cut down its price to $199.99 and $269.99 for the 8 and 9.7 inch models respectively. The discount was matched by Best Buy as well, and so far sales seem to have picked up a little bit after the announcement.
However, one thing is not clear – was this discount prompted by poor sales performance, or because the company is about to launch a new tablet soon? The latter option would make sense just as much as the former, as it’s a pretty standard marketing move to discount old products in a line when releasing a new one. There have been some rumors about the Galaxy Tab S2 as well, but nothing concrete until now.
And for what it’s worth, Samsung haven’t said anything about the new tablet themselves, though of course we don’t expect them to respond to the rumors right now if they’re not planning an official announcement of their own. We don’t know what the device is going to offer officially, but there have been some rumored specifications going around.
According to those, it will have a 1,536 x 2,048 display spanning over 8 inches, and underneath it will have an 8-core Exynos SoC, 3 GB of RAM, as well as 32 GB of built-in memory. It will also have an 8 megapixel camera on the rear and a 2.1 megapixel one on the front, but of course, as we said above, those are just rumors and nothing has been confirmed by the company itself for the moment.
It’s not very clear how it will be structured with regards to its different variants, as currently it’s rumored that it will have two “core” variants, differing in screen size – 8.0 and 9.7 inch respectively – but those might be further split into two variants themselves, one with LTE support and the other with Wi-Fi only.
That certainly makes sense, but it could make the device a bit too complicated for the market. It wouldn’t be the first tablet to come out with a similar style of segmentation, but customers have generally had a negative response to this idea in the past, and the general trend is that people seem to want a more unified approach to design and marketing right now.
On the other hand, there are also those who like to have more customization options, and for them, the different versions of the Galaxy Tab S2 are definitely something attractive. It remains to be seen how Samsung are going to decide to approach this, and it’s also possible that some of the variants might come at a later point instead of releasing everything at the same time. That would also match their strategy in the past in some cases.