Leaked image of Samsung's upcoming budget Galaxy Tab A8 (2021) surfaces

For a killer pandemic, COVID-19 sure breathed life into one tech product that was slowly dying, the tablet. Thanks to employees forced to work from home, and students who had to home school, demand for tablets rose as shipments of the device rose 13.1% last year to 164 million units. And at the end of the day, whether a tablet was used for work or school, it could be used to stream music and movies, and to play video games.

Samsung is about to introduce the Galaxy Tab A8 (2021), the follow-up to the affordable $230 Galaxy Tab A7 it released last year. And Evan Blass posted what could be a press render of the slate on his @evleaks Twitter account. Back in September, we passed along renders of the tablet made by OnLeaks. At the same time, we also mentioned what are reportedly the specs of the tablet.

The slate is expected to carry a display close to 10.5-inches in size with a mid-range Unisoc T618 chip under the hood. This chip will feature a pair of Cortex-A75 cores running at a clock speed of 2GHz along with six Cortex-A55 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. ARM's Mali-G52 MP2 is the GPU on board. The tablet is rumored to sport 3GB-4GB of memory with 64GB to as much as 128GB of storage offered. Wi-Fi and cellular versions will be made available.

The tablet will be equipped with a 7040mAh battery. On the back, you'll find an 8MP camera and a 5MP selfie snapper will adorn the front of the device. A side-mounted fingerprint scanner will be on the tablet as will an old-school earphone jack, a USB-C port, and a quad Dolby Atmos speaker system.

GSMArena published Geekbench 4 results that supposedly benchmarked the Galaxy Tab A8. The SM-X200 supposedly shows the results for the Wi-Fi-only version of the tablet while the SM-X205 shows the benchmark scores for the cellular version of the slate. Both versions had similar results.