Accidental Amazon Listing Reveals First Small-Screen Windows 8 Tablet

There have been rumors floating around the Web for a while now that there would soon be smaller-screen Windows RT/Windows 8 devices hitting stores. Those rumors were recently confirmed in an unlikely way: an accidental Amazon listing.

The listing briefly went up on Amazon.com last Friday and was quickly taken down, but it was too late to stop the product's information from spreading across the Internet. The Acer-made Iconia W3-810-1600 sports a display size of 8.1 inches, and is the smallest Windows 8 tablet yet made.

Indeed, up until now, all Windows 8 tablets have featured displays 10 inches or larger. In fact, Microsoft's Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets both have 10.6-inch displays — a size the company says is ideal for the OS.

However, it didn't seem likely that Microsoft would resist the siren song of small form factor tablets for long considering the success of tablets like the Amazon Kindle Fire and Google's Nexus 7. Microsoft also would probably like to further the progress it has made in the tablet space so far.

Meanwhile, more stalwart observers may have noticed that Microsoft has been tweaking the features and specs of its latest OS for a while now to accommodate smaller screen sizes. For example, the operating system's hardware certification program recently lowered the minimum allowable resolutions for Windows 8 tablets to 1024 x 768 from 1366 x 768.

The Acer Iconia W3 itself has been rumored since April and, while it still hasn't made its official debut, it no longer has any secrets left to hide. Aside from its display size, the Amazon listing also listed the tablet as having a 1280 x 800 resolution, 2GB of SDRAM, 32GB of internal memory and eight hours of battery life.

Curiously, the listing also claimed that the Iconia W3 sports a 1.5GHz Apple A4 processor, the processor found in the original iPad, while also claiming it runs on an Intel Atom CPU. For a number of reasons, the Atom CPU seems the more likely candidate. Of course, this also means the tablet will run full Windows 8, rather than Windows RT.