Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 to launch on June 8th in New York, June 17th for the rest of the US

The Big Apple: home of Yankee Stadium, oddly aggressive regional accents, and, soon, the spiritual home of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

For reasons best known to the South Korean firm, Samsung has decided that it’ll be launching its next stab at the increasingly lucrative tablet PC market by releasing the device in New York over a week before anywhere else in the States.

The Tab 10.1 won’t be available in any old store in the city, though. Instead, it’ll be exclusively the preserve of the Best Buy branch on Union Square, and only a limited number of the wi-fi only model will be on sale.

It’s likely this will cause a fair amount of queueing, seeing as the Tab 10.1 is a Honeycomb Android tablet with a dual-core processor and is widely considered to be the next big iPad-beater.

Don’t expect to just pop in during the day to pick one off the shelf is what I'm saying.

The device has been priced at $499 for the 16GB model and $599 for 32GB - exactly the same RRP as the respective Apple iPad 2s, which should make the resulting sales war very interesting.

Still no word on the European launch, however, but we’d eat our own Galaxy S if it comes out before the US nationwide release date of June 17th.