Before you launch a technology into the mainstream, you manufacture a few units for your partners, so they could see the potential of the new tech. Such is the case of Qualcomm, with their new Snapdragon S4 quad core CPUs, stuffed into new tablets, priced at $1299.
Qualcomm’s kit distributor BSQUARE posted the product for sale and these are MDPs (Mobile Development Platforms) I’m talking about. This one contains a 10.1 inch display seen on previous developer devices, multiple ports, fingerprint scanners and a 13 megapixel camera. There are also 7 microphones on board and the device runs Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich with a new quad core processor and 2GB of RAM.
With the huge price and huge specs, this is clearly a developer product, but the $1,299 price tag includes the slate, a charging dock with two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI and Ethernet. The new APQ8064 platform brings the Adreno 320 GPU, that should offer 4 times the performance of its predecessor, so we expect games to be rendered amazingly on the slate.
