14 DAY TRIAL // The upcoming Nexus 8 tablet was supposedly spotted in a header image on Google’s freshly set-up I/O event page, but further investigation into the matter revealed this was actually the Nexus 10.
Nevertheless, there’s little doubt the new tablet is indeed going to be unveiled at the event scheduled between June 25 and 26.
Anyway, if you need more proof to believe that in a month or so we’ll be able to the see the device, Myce reports digging up more traces of the tablet in the Android source code.
First of all, we should note that the previous references to Volantis / Flounder (the purported Nexus 8) have been removed by Google, so this surely means the company is hoping to preserve the mystery until the big date.
An entry in the source code goes like this “This should not have gone into aosp (Android Open Source Project – red) external (libpcap, tcpdump) have only been updated in kip-volantis-dev and downstream.”
Another change in the source code reveals developers are struggling to set up a new method to log items in Android. One developer writes:
“It will likely be removed from post-Volantis relese. It all stems from our ecosystem being cowardly comparatively. We have to support vendors that insist on deploying with the kernel logger, especially if they are retaining older kernels, do not want to disable the kernel logger for fear of change, and mixing them with later releases of the framework.”
But this information is quite sketchy and we can’t know for sure what the developer is actually talking about. However, the most interesting detail uncovered is the fact that Flounder (or Nexus 8) will be a Tegra-based device.
Could it be that the Nexus 8 might bundle the NVIDIA’s Tegra K1 chip architecture? If that turns out to be the case, the device could end up being quite a beast.
So, the latest information seems to annul earlier reports which claimed the Nexus 8 might arrive with an Intel Atom (Merrifield) Z3480.
In an earlier article, we pointed out that if this turned out to be the case, the Nexus 8 could even be marketed as a powerful gaming tablet. But with NVIDIA’s newest SoC inside, the slate will be even better.