Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Wikipad Gaming Tablet Reveals Impressive Hardware Specs

When the startup Wikipad debuted its namesake product at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, it was a 7″ tablet reminiscent of Amazon's Kindle Fire - except for the attachable gamepad case. Today they revealed finalized specifications for the device in an interview with VentureBeat.

The screen has grown three inches to 10.1", with a resolution of 1280 x 800. The company is holding off for now on the no-glasses 3D display it showcased at CES, but it's hard to believe many game developers would have gotten behind that feature anyway. The specifications announced today should pretty well guarantee support for existing and near-future Android games.

The Wikipad will run Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) on an NVIDIA Tegra 3 T30 with 1 GB of DDR2 RAM. The 1.4 GHz T30 is a bit faster than the T30L (1.2 GHz) in Google's Nexus 7, and not quite as powerful as the T33 in the forthcoming Ouya (1.6 GHz). The Wikipad's full-featured controller attachment (along with its standard multi-touch display) should make it a bridge between these more common Android gaming platforms, with full support for each control scheme.

The designers have promised at least 16GB of built in storage, though local storage hasn’t been finalized. As Fraser Townley, Wikipad's President of Sales, said, “we will not go down, we will only go up.”

At 560 grams the Wikipad is obviously much larger than a PS Vita or Nintendo 3DS, though it's only slightly thicker and actually lighter than an iPad 2.The 23.46Wh battery will purportedly last six hours gaming or eight hours playing video. And just in case you want to video-chat or take pictures with your new gaming tablet, the Wikipad will have front- and rear-facing cameras.

No word yet on pricing or release timeline - though Wikipad says the tablet will ship this year. What's a gaming-focused Android tablet worth to you? Let us know in the comments.

Jon Fox is a Seattle hipster who loves polar bears and climbing trees. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN


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