Samsung said to be working on a 10-inch Galaxy Tab 5 slate, and a low-priced budget slab

According to a report out of the Netherlands, Samsung is working on a 10-inch Galaxy Tab 5 tablet. It appears that major tablet manufacturers are moving ahead to larger screened slates. Apple is said to be rolling a 12-inch iPad Pro slab off of the assembly line during the second quarter, while Sony also is believed to have a 12-inch tablet in the works this year. With all of the larger sized phablets blurring the lines between phones and tablets, sales of smaller-sized slates have suffered, forcing manufacturers to go larger.

Evidence of Samsung's new Galaxy Tab 5 tablet comes from the Zauba website. This is the site that keeps track of imports and exports into India. On December 22nd, Samsung imported the SM-T555 tablet into the country for research and development. While it was made clear that this slate was not being offered for retail sale, it was valued at the equivalent of $354 USD. The next day, Sammy imported the SM-T116 tablet into India for testing. The 7-inch slate is to be destroyed after the testing is completed. 30 units, valued at $101 USD each, were brought into the country.

The best way to figure out what these devices could be, is to compare model numbers. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 10.1, which was released in May of this year, consisted of model numbers SM-T530 (Wi-Fi), SM-T531 (3G and Wi-Fi) and SM-T535 (3G, 4G and Wi-Fi). Compare the latter number with the SM-T555 seen on the Zauba site, and we are probably looking at the Samsung Galaxy Tab 5 10.1, powered by Android 5.0 and featuring the 64-bit processing capability of the Snapdragon 410. We could see a May or June release for the tablet.

According to the GeekBench website, the SM-T1116 appears to be an entry-level slate powered by a quad-core 1.2GHz Speadtrum SC8830. 1GB of RAM is inside with Android 4.4.4 pre-installed.


source: Geekbench (translated), Zauba via TechTastic (translated)