After weeks of leaks, Samsung today (May 27) announced the Galaxy Tab A7 Lite, an affordable tablet running the latest version of Android. Since the original Galaxy Tab A7 is our top pick for the best Android tablet available for purchase, this could be a big deal for tablet fans, especially the budget-conscious.

In our review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab A7, we praised the original A7's great battery life, thin bezel, and affordable price. Samsung's new Lite version starts at an even lower price of just $159 and comes with the latest version of Android, making it a strong contender for one of the best tablets on the market. While the new Galaxy Tab A7 Lite does not match the latest iPads (especially the powerful 12.9-inch iPad Pro 2021) in terms of performance or screen quality, the fact that it is several hundred dollars cheaper gives it a strong advantage.

Samsung announced the A7 Lite along with its new Galaxy Tab S7 FE tablet. Here is what we know so far about the lower-priced A7 Lite.

Samsung plans to start selling the Galaxy Tab A7 Lite in the US on June 10. [The starting price for the A7 Lite is $159, which is considerably cheaper than the $229 starting price of Samsung's first A7 tablet. However, the company is currently selling the original A7 at a steep discount ($89) through its website, so interested parties may still have time to pick up the older model at the significantly reduced price.

The Galaxy Tab A7 Lite appears to be a smaller, lighter version of the original A7, with a smaller, lower-resolution 8.7-inch screen. Our review of the original A7 was somewhat disappointed by the dimness of its 10-inch screen, so it will be good to see the A7 Lite's display reach more impressive brightness levels.

The smaller A7 Lite also appears to share the previous model's thin bezel. This is a nice design touch that could make the screen more immersive when used for watching movies or gaming.

The metal casing of the original A7 was available in dark gray, silver, and gold, but Samsung offers the new A7 Lite in gray and silver only.

The Galaxy Tab A7 Lite has an 8.7-inch screen with a resolution of 1340 x 800 pixels.

This is an important factor because the display of the original Galaxy Tab A7 was one of the biggest drawbacks of affordable Android tablets. In our review, we noted that the original A7's large 10.4-inch (2000 x 1200 pixels) display was a bit dim, not as bright as competitors like the Fire HD 10 tablet, and had poor image quality at wide viewing angles (30 degrees left and right).

Two stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos support adorn the Galaxy Tab A7 Lite, so you should expect decent sound quality from Samsung's latest budget Android tablet.

The original Galaxy Tab A7 has similar speakers, and during the course of our review we found that they were able to reproduce crisp, clear music and vocals. At higher volumes, the music tended to sound a bit distorted, and we will have to wait and see if the new A7 Lite has a speaker with similar issues.

The new Galaxy Tab A7 Lite will ship with an (as yet unnamed) octa-core processor packed with four pairs of 2.3GHz cores and another four pairs of 1.8GHz cores.

This could offer slightly better performance than the original Tab A7, which was powered by a similar Qualcomm SM6115 Snapdragon 662 octa-core processor with up to eight cores at only 2.0GHz.

However, even with notable improvements, one should not expect the A7 Lite to be a strong product. In our review of the original A7, we noted its modest performance while multitasking (lagging when heavily navigating Chrome tabs) and less than ideal performance in Android games such as Asphalt 9: Legends.

The A7 Lite has an 8MP camera on the back and a 2MP camera on the front.

However, the A7 Lite's camera is going to struggle to impress, as the original Galaxy Tab A7 struggled to take great pictures despite having a slightly better camera, 8MP on the back and 5MP on the front.

One of the big selling points of the original Galaxy Tab A7 was the fact that it ran pure Android, rather than the forked Fire OS that most Amazon tablets use.

This is because there are not that many affordable, high-quality Android tablets with pure Android. Instead, most are Amazon devices running the Fire OS, which means they don't always have access to the latest Google apps and are constantly battling a flood of Amazon ads and content.

The new Galaxy Tab A7 Lite should start shipping next month with the latest version of Android 11, making it a great budget-friendly option for getting a pure Android tablet.

Samsung has yet to provide an official estimate of how long the Galaxy Tab A7 Lite's 5,100mAh battery will last with sustained use, so it's hard to say if it will match the spectacular 13+ hour battery life that the original Tab A7 offered. It is hard to say.

However, the Tab A7's larger battery powered a larger screen, so the A7 Lite's smaller battery could still match the amazing performance of its predecessor.

Samsung's new Galaxy Tab A7 Lite looks to be a fairly decent compact Android tablet at a very low price.

We loved the portability, slim design, and tremendous battery life of the original Tab A7, so the fact that Samsung is shipping an even smaller version is very exciting. If you need a tablet and don't want to pay Apple's price, or want something you can use with your other Samsung Galaxy devices, the new Galaxy Tab A7 Lite is an attractive option.