Samsung Mobile chief JK Shin has confirmed that the company is working on an 8 inch Galaxy Note tablet. It’ll get its official coming out party during Mobile World Congress in late February, 2013.
The Galaxy Note line of phones and tablets are distinguished by their “S Pen” hardware and software. Like typical Android phones and tablets, you can use a Galaxy Note by tapping and swiping your fingers across a capacitive touchscreen, but you can also use a digital pen to write or draw with pressure-sensitive brush-strokes.
Right now Samsung offers a phone-sized Galaxy Note with a 5.5 inch display and a tablet-sized model with a 10 inch screen.
But with smaller tablets such as the Amazon Kindle Fire, Google Nexus 7, and Apple iPad Mini gaining in popularity, it’s not surprising that Samsung is looking to branch out a bit.
Recently an unannounced Samsung tablet (with a model number that’s suspiciously close to those for the company’s other Galaxy Note devices) crept through a few regulatory and testing sites. If the Galaxy Note 8 is actually this Samsung GT-N5100, it will likely have a 1.6 GHz processor and a 1280 x 800 pixel display.
via Engadget
I am not thrilled by the Note 10.1’s build quality or price in my opinion, but given the popularity of the Galaxy Note smartphones, I could see finding room in my bag for a more compact (and hopefully more solid) version that makes productivity apps its bread and butter. I don’t really know anything else about the tablet at this point, but I guess that it would ship with an Exynos 4 or Exynos 5 processor, a price somewhere between $200 and $300, and the Jelly Bean version of Android .