The Nexus saga is always an interesting one every year, and particularly this year in regards to the Nexus tablet lineup. We’ve seen leaks for an HTC-built Nexus 8 for some time now, and even recently have come into finding out what the specs allegedly are. Now it looks like there may very well be another Nexus that’s in the works for this year too, and it’s only 2 inches larger than the rumored Nexus 8. Codenamed Foo, a new 10.3-inch Nexus device has shown up on the GFXBench benchmark repository, and it’s got some pretty interesting specs.
First off let’s talk about what’s showing up as missing here. The device shows up as not having either front or rear-facing cameras and no accelerometer, barometer, GPS, compass, light sensor or NFC either. Even crazier this is showing up as not even having a touch screen; something that obviously makes a tablet what it is in the first place. All this can easily be explained by prototype models just being tested for compatibility and 3D performance in particular. These units would be built with just the basic hardware configuration and likely some sort of mouse or other pointer input device to interface with the operating system and running apps.
Now for what’s showing up as being used. A Tegra 4 is found inside running at 1.9GHz, which is a considerably less powerful chip than the Tegra K1 rumored to be inside the upcoming Nexus 8. What’s more is that it’s only running 2GB of RAM, which is considerably less than the 5GB rumored to be found inside the Nexus 8. Also odd is the “mere” 1920 x 1080 resolution found on the 10.3-inch screen, which is a bit confounding considering the 8-inch screen of the Nexus 8 would feature a higher resolution of 2560 x 1600. Last but certainly not least is the fact that it’s only running KitKat, which tells us this is definitely a test unit and not a final one, as anything new coming out of Google’s Nexus program this fall would definitely feature Android L. Will this one actually surface as a real tablet? People have been clamoring for a new 10-inch Nexus tablet for a long time now, so anything is surely possible.
