Barnes and Noble suspends sales of $50 Nook Android 7-inch tablet (Update: get your replacement charger now!)

Update (2/1): 
Late last year Barnes and Noble returned to the tablet business after previously opting instead to create “Nook” versions of Samsung Galaxy Tab products. The goal was to give the Kindle Fire some competition in the cheap tablet space. Unfortunately, things haven’t worked out so well for the book retailer.

After pulling the tablet a few weeks earlier, B&N has now formally announced its recall of the Nook 7, in conjunction with the U.S. CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission). The model of charger specifically affected by the recall is TPA-95A050100UU, which was bundled with the Nook 7 model BNTV450.

For more details, or to get your charger replaced, head over to the Nook 7’s official recall page. 

Original post:

On November 26 (Black Friday) last year, Barnes and Noble started selling its own 7-inch Nook Android tablet that was priced dirt cheap at $49.99, after previously selling rebranded and more expensive Samsung Tab tablets. Now, the bookseller has suspended sales of the new Nook tablet, less that two months after it launched.

The official Barnes and Noble web site currently shows that the Nook tablet “is not available” and 9to5Google adds that the tablet has also been removed from its brick-and-mortar book stores.

This news comes after an anonymous employee posted on Reddit that the company sent word to its stores to remove them and ship all of them back to the company earlier this week, with no explanation as to why it was issuing this silent recall.

As it turns out, Barnes and Noble made this move because of a faulty charging adapter that was included with the tablet. Android Police finally got a statement from a company spokesperson, stating it had received three reports that the casing for the tablet’s charging adapter broke apart while still in the socket.

The company stated that all current Nook tablet owners should “stop using the adapter until we provide a replacement adapter.” It plans to issue a more formal public recall with the help of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

To make matters worse, in December, it was discovered that the tablet had the same ADUPS software that was found in some smartphones made by BLU. That software secretly sent info from those smartphones to a server in China.

At that time, Barnes and Noble stated that the version of ADUPS on its Nook tablet was not collecting or sending personal info and it planned to issue an update in the near future that would ditch the software from the tablet entirely.