Just a day after a Samsung executive opined that his company’s performance in the tablet market has been less than stellar, availability of a new Samsung tablet has been announced by Verizon Wireless. On Thursday, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 will go on sale for a whopping $499 with a two-year service agreement.

The Galaxy Tab 7.7, as the name suggests, will feature a 7.7-inch Super AMOLED Plus display with a resolution of 1280×800 and 196 PPI.  The tablet is powered by a zippy Exynos dual-core Cortex A9 SoC CPU clocked at 1.4GHz. Other features include LTE support, 16GB of onboard flash storage, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, Bluetooth 3.0, 802.11n Wi-Fi, a 3MP primary camera, a 2MP front-facing camera, aGPS, and a microSDHC flash memory card slot.

The tablet is both thin and light, weighing just under 12-ounces and measuring about 0.3-inches thick.

Unfortunately, the Galaxy Tab 7.7 will ship with Android 3.2, not Android 4.0, though an upgrade to the latest version of Google’s mobile OS will come.  But this presents two questions – when and will:

When will the Android 4 upgrade be made available for the Galaxy Tab 7.7 and will Verizon make the update available for its particular model?  We’ll find out later this year.

With a smartphone market awash in dual core processors, and with quad-core processors now beginning to make an appearance, Windows Phone fans have been asking for some time why their favorite handsets have been relegated to single-coredom.  Even the latest round of Windows Phones such as the upcoming Nokia Lumia 900, impressive though they may be in many respects, are single-core SoC affairs. 

But there are signs that is about to change. The latest glimmer of hope?  Speaking at MWC, Rob Chandhok, a Qualcomm Senior VP, said “"It’s not for me to announce when S4 is coming to Windows Phone – I’ll leave that to the OEMs – but there’s no structural problem between then and now."

If Qualcomm is working on bringing high-end, modern SoCs to Windows Phone, you can bet other chipmakers are, too.  But we’ll likely have to late until late 2012 – or longer – for dual core Windows Phones to become a reality; Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango,” the latest version of the OS, doesn’t support multi-core processors.  This restriction will be lifted in Windows Phone 8, due out sometime between late 2012 and whenever Microsoft gets around to it.

We’re constantly getting questions about prepaid Android phones.  While the situation hasn’t changed all that much in recent months, there are new prepaid Android options dropping here and there, including the Samsung Galaxy Precedent.

The Galaxy Precedent is available on the Straight Talk service, which offers unlimited talk, text and data for a very attractive $45 per month with no commitment.  Straight Talk is powered by different wireless carriers, but the phones and service cards are available only through Wal-Mart.

Right now, Wal-Mart.com is offering the Galaxy Precedent for less than $130, which is a pretty great deal for an Android phone without a contract subsidy. 

Features include Android 2.2, a 3.2-inch touchscreen, a 2MP camera, an 800MHz CPU, a 1500mAh battery for up to 6 hours of talk time, and a microSD memory card slot for additional storage over the pretty paltry 380MB of onboard memory (a 2GB card is included).  The phone weighs in at 3.8-ounces.

HTC’s new One Series of Android 4 powered smartphones have just been announced, and they’re an impressive trio. 

The HTC One X (center) will be coming to the U.S. via AT&T, and is the flagship model of the bunch.  This Android phone has a whopping 4.7-inch SLCD touchscreen display with a Retina-quality HD resolution and PPI.  The HTC One S (left) is the mid-range model, but is still mostly high-end when it comes to hardware with a 4.3-inch AMOLED screen. 

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Unless you’re a die-hard B&N devotee, there are very few reasons to choose the Nook Tablet over the Kindle Fire, and the extra $50 you have to shell out for the Nook doesn’t help.  But it now appears that a new 8GB Nook Tablet will soon launch, and while taking away one of the few advantages over the Fire (2x the onboard storage) won’t likely sway would-be buyers, a new price point might.

A leaked Wal-Mart inventory memo states that the new 8GB Nook Tablet will ship on Wednesday, February 22.  This looks legit, so the only question now is: how much will it cost? 

$199?  $150? 

We’ll know Wednesday.

Update: Well, the rumor was correct, except for the date; B&N released the new 8GB Nook Tablet this morning.  The price is $199, and the 16GB version is still available at $249.