Nook BNTV800 tablet outed by impressive Tegra 4 benchmarks

Nook HD, HD+
Fourth time's a charm?

Manufacturers should know by now not to test unannounced hardware in the wild using public benchmarking tools, which traditionally leads to leaks such as Barnes & Noble's forthcoming effort.

The Droid Guy reported that Barnes & Noble's next Nook-branded tablet may very well be worth waiting for - at least based on a set of specs that recently showed up via benchmarks.

Bearing the model number BNTV800, the unannounced fourth-generation Nook tablet popped up on the radar with some mighty impressive specs courtesy of benchmarking website GFXBench.

That particular model number lines up nicely against earlier models such as Nook HD and Nook HD+, which were branded internally as BNTV400 and BNTV600 respectively, suggesting the benchmarked hardware could indeed be the real deal.

Sizing it up

While earlier Nook models were powered by relatively pokey Ti OMAP 4470 SoCs, the BNTV800 appears to come equipped with a welcome upgrade to a quad-core 1.8GHz Nvidia Tegra 4 CPU.

Barnes & Noble will also apparently infuse a heavily skinned version of Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean for the BNTV800 - not the latest and greatest confectionary flavor, but we'll have to take what we can get.

Despite this treasure trove of specifications, the BNTV800 is apparently keeping at least one mystery close to the vest: Will it be a 7-inch or a 9-inch model?

The specs reveal a 1620 x 1008 display resolution, an odd number that suggests on-screen buttons could be part of the mix, but the actual dimensions of that screen are still anyone's guess.