Tablet sales may be in a lull but that isn't stopping industry heavyweights like Asus from continuing to turn out new slates at a regular clip. Case in point is the ZenPad 3 8.0, a premium tablet that the Chinese electronics maker recently unveiled with little fanfare.
The ZenPad 3 8.0 features a 7.9-inch IPS LED display with an impressive QXGA resolution of 2,048 x 1,536 (324 PPI) that's powered by Qualcomm's hexa-core Snapdragon 650 SoC (two Cortex-A72 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores) and an Adreno 510 GPU paired with up to 4GB of LPDDR3 RAM and 32GB of internal flash memory (expandable via microSD card slot).
You also get 5GB of cloud storage space from Asus for life, an additional 11GB for one year and 100GB of Google Drive space for two years.
The slate includes an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, a 2-megapixel camera around front for video calls, a USB Type-C port, Bluetooth 4.1, 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi, two "premium" speakers and more. It'll ship running Android 6.0 Marshmallow and Asus claims the 4,680mAh battery is good for up to 11 hours of use between charges.
Astute readers may recognize that this tablet looks an awful lot like the ZenPad Z8 that Asus and Verizon teamed up on earlier this year. The ZenPad 3 8.0 and the ZenPad Z8 do appear to be one in the same, save for the fact that the new one isn't exclusive to just one wireless carrier (the Verizon model also only had 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage).
No word yet on how much the ZenPad 3 8.0 will sell for or when exactly it'll be available. For reference, the Verizon model commanded $250 sans contract.