Qualcomm outs the Snapdragon S4 Pro dev tablet

The San Diego-headquartered tech company Qualcomm has unveiled a new, high-performance tablet aimed at software developers. Running on an Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, the Snapdragon S4 Pro device is now available for purchase (through BSQUARE), carrying a relatively hefty price-tag of 1,299 US Dollars.

Reportedly, the powerful MDP (Mobile Development Platform) reference tablet is equipped with Qualcomm’s very own APQ8064 SoC that incorporates four asynchronous Krait cores, operating at a frequency of 1.5GHz, and the latest Adreno 320 graphics processing unit. Moreover, this processor should be capable of running the upcoming Windows 8 OS, following an announcement made by Qualcomm and Microsoft back in 2011.

Users are further provided with a 10.1-inch multitouch-enabled widescreen display of WXGA (1366-by-768 pixels) native resolution, 2GB Low Power DDR2 RAM (LPDDR2) and 32GB of eMMC storage. Built-in sensors apparently include 3D accelerometer, 3-axis gyro, an eCompass, a fingerprint reader for enhanced security, ambient light/proximity and temperature/pressure sensors.

Connectivity-wise, Qualcomm’s new MDP offers one microUSB HS OTG port, a microSD card slot and a connector for the dedicated charging dock. The manufacturer claims the docking station itself comes stacked with two full-sized USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet LAN and an HDMI interface.

The Snapdragon S4 Pro also features dual cameras (2MP front-facing and a 13MP rear-facing camera), 7 integrated microphones for FluencePro and Ultrasound complemented by two built-in stereo speakers.

The guys over at CNET Asia were able to run some benchmark tests and Qualcomm’s dev tablet scored better than any Android device on the market today, including the Samsung Galaxy S III (Quad-Core Exynos 4412 processor at 1.4GHz), the HTC One XL (Dual-Core MSM8960 Snapdragon CPU at 1.5GHz) and mobile products based on an NVIDIA Tegra 3 SoC.

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