The device has only been announced for Japan, so far

May 9, 2014 06:38 GMT  ·  By

Not so long ago, it was revealed ASUS was working on a bunch of new MeMO Pad tablets with 10-inch, 8-inch and 7-inch displays.

Now, the company has launched the new MeMO Pad 8 version in Japan. The news comes from the Japanese website KDDI, which plans to start selling the device this August, reports MobileGeeks. Contrary to what we have been telling you before, the Japanese MeMO Pad 8 seems to come sporting a pretty nice set of specifications.

For starters, the side frames enclosing the display have been made thinner, as their thickness has been decreased from 9.9 mm / 0.38 inches to 7.45 mm / 0.29 inches. The weight has also been slightly reduced, shrinking from 350 g / 0.77 lbs to 305 g / 0.6 lbs.

Furthermore, the tablet’s battery capacity has been increased from 3950 mAh to 4350 mAh. Moving on, the display still uses an IPS panel type, but there’s a notable difference compared to the previous model (only has 1280 x 800 pixels) given the fact that we’re dealing with full HD (1920 x 1200 pixel) resolution.

The major change lies in the hardware department, however. The ASUS MeMO Pad 8 has abandoned the ARM platform (meaning the MediaTek SoC) and has taken up one of Intel’s latest chips.

Now, under the hood of the ASUS MeMO Pad 8 lies one of the new members of the Moorefield family, in the form of a quad-core Intel Atom Z3580 processor clocked at 2.3GHz and fitted with PowerVR G6430 533 MHz.

The Moorefield CPU series is based on the same architecture as the Intel Merrifield chips, except it arrives with higher clock speeds, better graphics performance and is quad-core.

The graphics processor in the new chip belongs to the new Series 6 Rogue, so customers are expected to see improve performance, compared to SGX 5 models.

The new slate will arrive with 2GB of RAM, instead of 1GB and 16GB of internal storage just like before (which is expandable via microSD). Other specifications include a 1.2MP frontal camera, a rear 5MP snapper, NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi, LTE and WiMAX.

Last but not least, we should mention the ASUS MeMO Pad 8 runs Android 4.4 KitKat out of the box and has the proprietary interface UI Zen, on top of everything.

Sadly, we can’t tell at this moment if the device will only sell on the Japanese market or ASUS has plans of releasing it worldwide. No word on the pricing specifications either.