Samsung announces 3 new tablets: TabPRO 8.4, TabPRO 10.1, and TabPRO 12.2

Samsung's competitors, as anxious as they are to kick the incumbent king down a peg, won't be having a very good day once they catch a word of this: Sammy just took the drapes off four new tablets, each packing some seriously mouth-watering hardware. Three of those are the first recruits into Samsung's newly-formed army, dubbed TabPRO, an army that was created with one simple aim in mind: show the tablet industry who is boss:


That's quite a statement, yet even we can't offer much in the way of disagreement – these new slates pack some pretty awesome specs and are truly diverse in their appeal, as they offer just about every form factor. As you've probably guessed, these come in three sizes: 8.4-inches, 10.1-inches and the downright giant 12.2-inches, and yet here's the best part: practically everything about the internals is identical, with the exception of the amount of memory on board, the battery's capacity, weight and dimensions. That's great, seeing as all 4G LTE variations of the trio are packing Qualcomm's 2.3GHz bin of its mighty quad-core Snapdragon 800, while the Wi-Fi+3G models pack Samsung's promising Exynos 5420 chipset. That latter one runs ARM's big.LITTLE config, meaning that four powerful 1.9GHz Cortex-A15 cores are working alongside a cluster of four, more frugal 1.3GHz Cortex-A7 ones that take care of the mundane, background tasks, all the while conserving power. Best of all, Samsung has long promised that a future software update will make it possible for the octa-core chipset to utilize all of its cores at once, should those ever be required. Moreover, a healthy 2GB of RAM is being made available for the smaller, TabPRO 8.4 and TabPRO 10.1 slates, while the TabPRO 12.2 packs the still rare 3GB of RAM.

Of course, all this power isn't likely to go to waste, as the South Korean manufacturer has outfitted the three new tablets with crisp 1600x2560 LCD displays. Internal memory sits at 16GB or 32GB, in the case of the 8.4- and 10.1-inchers, while the giant 12.2-inch TabPRO has 32GB and 64GB options. Sammy has seen fit to install the same duo of camera units on each of the new TabPROs – an 8-megapixel rear snapper with AutoFocus capabilities and an LED flash, and a 2-megapixel shooter at the front. Battery capacity, as can be expected, varies depending on the size of the slate: the 12.2-incher packs the most potent, 9500mAh cell, with a 8220mAh battery for the 10.1-inch TabPRO and a much smaller, 4800mAh one for the TabPRO 8.4.

And, yet, there's more. Samsung must really want to make 2014 all about tablets, for it's extending the bygone holiday festivites into this year as well, with a massive package of freebies. Depending on the region of the buyer, pre-paid subscriptions to a number of services, such as DropBox, Businessweek+, NY Times, Oxford Advanced Learner's A-Z and Sketbook Pro, are all being made available for free to those who invest into Sammy's new offerings. The electronics giant estimates the package at approximately $700, which is funny, seeing as no pricing information has been relayed whatsoever. Thankfully, we're at least told to expect to see these bad boys in action as early as Q1, 2014.

Anyone excited?