Forget press releases, Samsung certainly likes putting yet-to-be-announced products in plain sight. You may remember the Samsung Galaxy S21 FE appeared on the company’s official Instagram six months before it was finally released, and now an upcoming tablet has got the same accidental debut.
First spotted by 91Mobiles, the support page for Bixby — the virtual assistant that Samsung is desperately trying to make a thing — currently carries an image of the S21 Ultra and a mystery unreleased tablet. Assuming it hasn’t been taken down yet, you can see it in situ yourself by expanding the section called “Voice wake-up on multiple devices”. But here’s what it looks like if you want to save the click:
Thanks to the unsightly notch, we were already willing to bet that it was the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra, but Samsung then ruined the guessing game by attaching a give-away image description, which appears when you roll your mouse over the picture:
Recent leaks suggest the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra will be a beast of a tablet, both in terms of size and power. Packing the brand new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC with up to 16GB RAM, 512GB of internal storage and a bundled S Pen, it’s not going to come cheap. Nor is it likely to be particularly fun to carry around, what with it apparently coming in at 14.6in across and tipping the scales at 728 grams.
But all of this may be a moot point, as it sounds like it’s going to be exceptionally hard to come by anyway. Back in October, the Korean blog Naver stated that “only a very small amount will be released” in a “small number of regions”. After the initial allocation is sold, Samsung apparently plans to produce “very little” to replace them, either.
Hardly surprising in the current climate where chip shortages are the order of the day, but disappointing all the same. It seems that Samsung wants the Tab S8 Ultra to be a desirable product, but isn’t too concerned with little details like whether most people will actually be able to buy one…
That’s assuming Naver’s analysis is correct. We’re expecting a Samsung event next month for the Galaxy S22 handset, and maybe we’ll see the company’s next generation of tablets then, too.
