EVGA Releases Tegra NOTE 7 Tablet, Features Tegra 4 & Included Stylus

Been holding out on a tablet purchase until NVIDIA’s Tegra Note platform turned itself into a released product? Well, we have some good news: EVGA’s take on it will be here next week, in the form of the appropriately named EVGA Tegra NOTE 7.

Because the latest Nexus 7 passed on by Tegra 4, EVGA’s tablet becomes the first on the market that packs in NVIDIA’s latest and greatest mobile SoC. As we discovered in our look at SHIELD, it certainly packs a punch, and manages to beat out the new Nexus 7 quite handily.

Outside of packing a Tegra 4 chip, Tegra NOTE 7 includes a stylus, and it’s claimed to be one of the most responsive, and accurate, implementations to date – as well as the only “Chisel-tip” on the market. While a chip like Tegra 4 pretty-much insinuates gaming, it’s clear that productivity is a huge focus here as well.

With the built-in camera, NVIDIA’s Chimera computational photography accelerator is taken care of, with “always-on HDR”, making the Tegra NOTE 7 also the world’s first HDR tablet. With the camera loaded up, tapping the screen in a particular area will shift the focus there, and if you want to create a dramatic effect, you can slow things down on-the-fly.

Yet another thing to set this tablet apart from most others is front-facing speakers, and if they’re anything like those found on the SHIELD, I’d say you’re in for a treat.

Speaking of the SHIELD, Tegra NOTE 7 features a resolution of 1280×800, something a lot of people are going to question given the recent trend of implementing 1080p or higher. Once again, we have to point to our SHIELD review, where we discovered that games simply run much slower at 1080p – we face the exact same issue on the desktop. The current-gen Nexus 7 scored 15 FPS in a benchmark that SHIELD scored 40 FPS in – if gaming, which would you prefer?

NVIDIA clearly felt that the mammoth performance hit in gaming wasn’t worth the extra bit of crispness, and I have no reservations at all with agreeing. If in charge of the product’s design, I would have gone the same route. Unfortunately, this decision is still one that’s going to confuse a lot of people, and possibly make the Tegra Note platform seem a bit lackluster, undeservedly so.

It can be imagined that Tegra NOTE 7 will ship with Android 4.3 (given 4.4 just came out). All of this for $199? That sounds unbeatable as far as tablets go – cheaper than Nexus 7, and it includes a stylus. Do want. Get your pre-order here.