Hands-On With Qualcomm's Snappy Snapdragon S4 Pro Tablet

25.07.2012
Hold on tight, because a new speedster is coming to phones and tablets. Yesterday, Qualcomm unveiled its quad-core . The company may be late to the quad-core party, but if our early look at the $1300 reference design tablet for developers is any indication of what to expect from actual shipping products, Qualcomm has brought its A-game and will be capable of delivering top-notch performance.

I spent hours digging deep into this tablet, learning more about the chip, running benchmarks, and loading it with my own content; I left encouraged by what I saw. This was not the S4 Pro's first unveiling; we've been hearing about this chip all year. But Qualcomm has announced that it is finally sampling the chip and making it available to manufacturers, which means that we should see products using the S4 Pro debuting in time for the holiday shopping season.

Qualcomm also took the unusual step of allowing full access to its reference design tablet. This tablet lacked the finesse of what I'd expect from a commercial release, though it appeared improved from some of the rougher designs I'd seen demoed earlier in the year. It's thicker than you'd expect, and heavier, with 1366-by-768-pixel resolution and a huge air gap on the screen.

By having full access to this reference design--dubbed an MDP/T, or mobile development platform tablet, and the first device to use the Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 processor--we had the chance to run this processor through its paces at first-hand, those paces including both raw benchmarking and user experience.

Besides the S4 Pro processor, the tablet has 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, and runs a stock version of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. (Qualcomm has 4.1 Jelly Bean working in its labs, and plans to offer an upgrade when it's ready.) The 2GB of RAM (instead of 1GB) is neither necessary nor a given for the S4 Pro platform, according to Qualcomm. We were told that the MDP/T includes 2GB more or less because the company wanted to pack it to its fullest for developers; but the tablet standard today is 1GB, and Qualcomm indicated that the extra RAM shouldn't directly affect performance, as currently no applications would take advantage of it.