Samsung has officially announced its 8in and 10.1in Galaxy Tab 3 Android tablets, powered by Intel processors rather than the usual ARM architecture.
Rumours of an Intel processor in the Galaxy Tab 3 surfaced at the end of May, although Samsung wouldn't confirm anything until today. The reason for the move appears to be one of supply rather than a deep-routed urge to move away from its ARM-based Exynos chips.
"In order to meet the demand from our vendor/carrier partners and provide a consistent high-quality experience for customers, Samsung has sourced components, including chipsets, from trusted partners," said the official statement from Samsung.
Samsung has not confirmed that exact model number of the CPUs being used, only referring to the number of cores and speeds, although Clovertrail Atom processors are the likely candidate. The Galaxy Tab 3 8-inch will have a 1.5GHz dual-core CPU, while the Galaxy Tab 3 10.1-inch will have a 1.6GHz dual-core processor.
We'll be interested to see how well the tablets do in benchmarks. When we first saw an Intel-powered Android device (the Motorola RAZR i ), we found it to be really quick. However, ARM-based processors have come on in leaps-and-bounds since then, making it a much closer-run thing.
Aside from the Intel processor it's pretty much business as normal for these tablets. The Galaxy Tab 3 8-inch looks like a larger version of the recently launched Galaxy Tab 3 7-inch. It has a screen resolution of 1,280x800, up from the 1,024x600 of last year's model, the Samsung Galaxy 2 7.0 .
The Galaxy Tab 3 10.1-inch maintains the same 1,280x800 resolution of last year's Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 .
It's interesting to note that this year's tablets now have physical buttons, rather than the on-screen only buttons of last year's models. These include the lozenge-shaped Home button of the Samsung Galaxy S4 , a Back button and a Menu button.
Both tablets will ship later this year in the UK. There will be 4G LTE, 4G and Wi-Fi only versions, although no details have been released as to which models we'll get here in the UK.
