The elusive GT-N5100, also referred to as the 7-inch Galaxy Note is no stranger to the Android rumor mills. A little over a month ago, two Samsung manufactured devices bearing the model numbers GT-N5100 and GT-N5110 had shown up for DLNA and WiFi certification. Details indicated an international and a carrier-oriented variant of a hybrid device, and given the N in the model number, all logic pointed towards a new baby in the Note series.

A couple of days later, leaked UAProf details for the GT-N5100 indicated a 800 x 1280 WXGA display, and the rumors of a 7 -inch Galaxy Note started buzzing even more furiously. A senior spokesperson from Samsung however, later dispelled these rumors as baseless and stated that no such device was in the works at Samsung.

This seemed pretty strange at the time considering the device had appeared on the grid more than once, and had even gone through a formal certification process through an official body like DLNA. But that was that, and the rumor mills slowly abated and moved on to other juicy morsels in the Android world.

After almost a month of silence, the mysterious GT-N5100 has now shown its face again, this time in a Nena Mark bench test result, igniting speculations all over again. As you can see from the screenshot above, the device clearly labelled as the GT-N5100 seems to have a 1280 x 720 pixel display, which is slightly different from the 1280 x 800 pixels reported earlier. This time though, there are some additional juicy details that have come to light, notable among them being the presence of 1.6 GHz CPU and an ARM Mali-400 GPU.

Experts believe that the CPU is most likely to be a quad-core Exynos 4412 chip (it is codenamed as pegasusq as you can see above), and the presence of the Mali-400 GPU seems to be in line with that belief. The interesting thing though is that the OS version seems to be Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean, and considering 4.1.2 is a pretty stable version of Jelly Bean, the release date for this mystery device could well be very near.

Well, CES and MWC are almost upon us. And we may well be in for a 7-inch treat at either or both events. For now Samsung is still tight lipped, although we just can’t understand why they would want to deny the existence of something like this in the first place. That said, it sure does seem like 2013 is gonna be an exciting year to look forward to.

Via Notebook Italia