8-inch Galaxy Note to be announced at MWC

So it seems that the mysterious 8-inch Galaxy Note will have its moment in Barcelona, after all. Samsung’s Head of Mobile Communications, JK Shin, all but confirmed that the 8-inch tablet will be announced at the Mobile World Congress in the Catalan capital.

Shin allegedly confirmed the device's existence to Korean news outlet iNews24 during an invitation only dinner involving Samsung’s new high-level officers and some members of the Korean press. However, no other details were provided by Shin.

The 8-inch slate is expected to be the same mysterious GT-N5100 that popped up on numerous benchmarks a few days ago. As we had reported last week, the device, which will most likely compete with the iPad mini, will have an 8-inch LCD of the Wacom variety with a resolution of 1280 x 800. That’s the same amount of pixels as the big brother Galaxy Note 10.1, so the display will likely be crisper thanks to the higher pixel density. A 5 megapixel camera is expected to sit on the back, with a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera.

The Note 10.1 tablet is set to get some company next month

On the processor front, it is expected that Samsung may employ the Exynos 5 Octa processor, which it announced during CES, earlier this month. The eight-core processor is based on the ARM big.LITTLE/Cortex A-15 architecture and is designed to be a low powered, high performance mobile processor. Other technical specifications are exepcted to be 2GB of RAM, 16/32GB of internal storage along with a microSD slot and a 4600 mAh battery. Besides have the usual bouquet of connectivity options like Bluetooth 4.0, USB 2.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n and A-GPS. The new Note tab will run Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and will be 211.3 x 136.3 x 7.95 mm in dimensions and will weigh around 330 g. The specifications and the screen size lead us to believe that the new Note will be in direct competition with Apple's iPad mini.

A Google translation of the Korean on inews24’s site also mentions that Samsung will not unveil any major phones in Barcelona. That would mean that the Korean company will continue announcing its major phones at its own private event, like it did last May with the Galaxy S III in London. So those eagerly awaiting the follow-up to Samsung’s flagship device will have to wait longer than next month for a proper look.

The Galaxy SIV is one of the most awaited devices of the year and has already started to whet the appetite of Android fans. Its rumoured specs include an Exynos 5450 Quad-Core CPU clocked at 2.0GHz, a Mali-T658 GPU, 2GB of RAM, a 4.99-inch Super AMOLED screen with a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels and a 13 megapixel rear camera, with Android 4.2.1.