First quad core Tegra 3 'Kal-El' tablet is a ZTE T98

You would’ve thought the most likely candidates for the first quad-core tablet device were Motorola, Samsung, HTC or perhaps even LG.

Not so, it seems as a leaked image has emerged out of China showing a brand new quad core tablet by ZTE.

The ZTE tablet, dubbed the T98, was showcased at a Beijing event, where it was reported it’ll boast Nvidia’s latest Tegra 3 quad core Kal-El chip.

The thing is, that quad core chip isn’t actually quad core. Nvidia just announced last week that the Kal-El chip will be gaining an extra ‘companion core’, bringing the total number up to five.

Nvidia explained that the companion core helps maintain battery optimisation while the other cores are performance optimised.

Essentially the companion core does most of the ticking over in ‘active standby’, but when anything serious needs doing the other four cores kick-in and take over.

It sounds rather similar to those combination fuel cell and petrol engines on some cars which switch between the two at specific points for greater overall efficiency.

Anyway, back to the tablet.

The T98 is a 7-inch device with a 1280x800 pixel HD display and measuring a mere 11.5mm thick. Android 3.2 Honeycomb is onboard, along with 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. A 4,000 mAH battery keeps everything moving along.

There’s no precise word on the clock-speed of that monster processor yet but you can rest assured with five cores to play with it’ll be pretty rapid.

For the snap-happy amongst you there’s a 5-megapixel primary camera backed up by a 2-megapixel secondary and 1080p capture capability.

Unfortunately, it’s far too early for prices and release dates at this stage, although there’s some indication it’ll hit the Asian market first.

ZTE’s hardware typically makes its way over to Blighty in the form of re-branded network devices anyway, so we’d expect to see it appear with a new name and wearing team stickers some time next year.