Snapdragon S4 Liquid development tablet and ‘Desert Winds’ hands-on

Here's one dual-core slate you won't find in stores: Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 Liquid Mobile Development Platform, or MDP for short. We already told you about the raw specs a couple of months ago — including a Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 "Krait" chip with Adreno 225 graphics, integrated LTE, two 13-megapixel cameras and a 10.1-inch, 1366 x 768 screen, and now, Android 4.0 — but today we got our hands on the tablet and tried out Desert Winds.

We'd previously seen our buxom warrior woman traverse the desert on a 1.2GHz Snapdragon S3 APQ8060 chip, but it looked better than ever on the 1.5GHz MSM8960 tablet here at 720p with very few jagged edges to speak of. You'll find the same MSM8960 SoC in the Asus Padfone and Lenovo IdeaPad S2, by the way. We also confirmed that the Desert Winds tech demo will actually morph into a real game, scheduled to arrive by the end of the year, though many of the proposed details (character, storyline) will change between now and then. You can actually play through the demo yourself on Android now: find the installer at our Android Market source link.