An ASUS-made device bearing the model number ZT582KL was leaked by a known industry insider Evan Blass on Tuesday, with the source claiming that the tablet in question is Verizon’s version of the ASUS ZenPad Z8 (2017). While the seemingly official renders that can be seen above this writing don’t reveal the exact model of the product, the device certainly features Verizon’s branding on its rear panel, located beneath AsusTek’s own logo. The back plate of the supposed ZenPad Z8 (2017) also sports a single-lens camera setup in its top-left corner that isn’t accompanied by a flash unit, and neither is the module centered on the device’s top bezel. The alleged ZenPad Z8 (2017) sports a physical Home button that doesn’t necessarily house a fingerprint reader seeing how such a scanner wasn’t featured on its predecessor, the ZenPad Z8 (2016).
The first render of the tablet indicates that at least one of its variants will be 4G LTE-enabled, as evidenced by the mobile service signal seen in its status bar. Likewise, the ZenPad Z8 (2017) is seemingly running some variant of Android Nougat skinned with ASUS’s mobile software suite and featuring a number of Verizon’s own apps. The largest wireless carrier in the United States announced the original ZenPad Z8 (2016) in mid-June last year, so its successor may be officially unveiled in the near future.
The original tablet sported a 7.9-inch display panel with a resolution of 2048 by 1536 pixels and was powered by the Snapdragon 650 system-on-chip (SoC), Qualcomm’s mid-range piece of silicon equipped with the Adreno 510 GPU, four Cortex-A53 clocked at 1.4GHz, and two Cortex-A72 cores operating at a maximum frequency of 1.8GHz. The tablet also boasted 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal flash memory expandable by up to 256GB via a dedicated microSD card slot which will also be featured on the ZenPad Z8 (2017), as suggested by its first supposed render. The 2016 tablet was running Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box and was fueled by a 4,680mAh battery, with its successor expected to be a direct upgrade in most of those aspects. More details on the availability and pricing of the ZenPad Z8 (2017) will likely follow in the coming weeks.