Spredtrum, known for their phone chipsets, is set to enter the tabletmarket with an all new chipet which can offer up to 3 sim card support!
The tabletmarket is expected to be a large area of growth in China and around the world this year. Fresh off of being bought by Tsinghua Holdings, they are looking to capitalize on the growing tabletmarket.
The guys at GSMinsiderfirst mentioned the news, but we found more complete specs on Spredtrum’s website.
Earlier this week, Spreadtrum announced the creation of a 3G/4G tabletchipset dubbed SC5735.It supports quad-core ARM-A7 Cortex CPUs up to 1.2Ghz, up to 2GB of RAM, up to a 5 MP backfacing camera and 2MP secondary cameras. It is also compatible with Android 4.4 (KitKat) and has the usual GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth and FM Radio capabilities. It uses a Mali GPU, supports 1080p video and uses Spreadtrum’s “turnkey” Mocor platform.
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The chipset also supports a wide variety of cellular networks (dual-band WCDMA/HSPA+ and quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE) and has space for three SIM cards.
The chipset is being tested with select customers now (I guess you could call that a “Beta”) and is expected to hit full scale production sometime next month. GSMinsider predicts we should see Spredtrum powered tablets sometime in the first half of this year.
While those specs are highly variable depending on who is making the tablet judging simply by the camera specs and the ARM-A7 Cortex CPUs, we are looking at low to mid level tablets, designed to compete with the likes of the Nexus 7.
Over here in the west, you can feel the pressure Chinese phone companies have been putting on international ones. Whether they admit it or not, the influx of low priced, unlocked phones definitely has something to do with increased competition from companies running on cheap MediaTek and others hardware. For a company like Spreadtrum to be moving into the tablet market, we could see something similar happen again (although to be fair, thanks largely to Google, International tablets don’t have the same inflated prices that phones do).