A Lenovo-made tablet bearing the model number TB-8704V has been certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance (WFA), possibly hinting that the device may be launched fairly soon. As you’d expect from listings on the WFA website, not much is revealed about the hardware specs of the upcoming device, but on the software side of things, the listing does reveal that the tablet was running Android 7.1.1 at the time of testing. The rest of the info are mostly technical details about the tablet’s Wi-Fi hardware and firmware, which doesn’t really provide any real insight into the new device. It remains to be seen how long it takes for Lenovo to make this device official.
Lenovo is currently the fifth-largest tablet vendor in the world after Apple, Samsung, Huawei, and Amazon. The latest tablets announced by the company are all mid-range devices called the Tab 4 8, Tab 4 8 Plus, Tab 4 10, and the Tab 4 10 Plus which were unveiled last February at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain. However, none of those are available for purchase just yet but are expected to be launched by the end of this month. It’s currently unclear whether the Wi-Fi-certified TB-8704V is one of these upcoming tablets or if it’s a completely new device that has yet to be unveiled.
The global tablet market has been shrinking pretty steadily over the past few years even as the smartphone industry keeps growing on an annual basis. It was just last week that IDC published its latest ‘Quarterly Tablet Tracker’ that claimed the global tablet market had shrunk for the tenth consecutive quarter during the first three months of this year even as global PC shipments actually made a small recovery after five successive years of precipitous decline. Those results don’t correspond with numerous “post-PC era” talks that were happening at the start of this decade, with many market analysts, industry insiders, and even tech enthusiasts predicting that it’s only a matter of time before traditional computers are replaced by tablets. While tablets are unlikely to push out traditional PCs from the market anytime soon, manufacturers are certainly hoping that the industry gets back to growth sooner rather than later.