The tablet wars are heating up and the latest entrant to join the bandwagon is Qualcomm. On July 24, the San Diego-based company unleashed its latest Snapdragon processor - The Snapdragon S4 Pro, running on a developer tablet, to the press. The tablet, also known as a Mobile Development Platform (MDP), is built by BSquare and is available for a hefty $1,299 on BSquare's website.

Touted as a contender to NVIDIA's quad-core Tegra 3 processor, the Snapdragon S4 Pro is aimed primarily at developers. With its $1299 price tag, the tablet will surely burn a hole in your wallet. The world got its first glimpse of the Snapdragon S4 Pro processor in February 2012 at the Mobile World Congress. However, this is the first time we've seen it on a working, non-prototype device.

The Qualcomm tab offering doesn't score very highly on the attractiveness quotient. It has a simple black plastic shell, which is unadorned (barring the Snapdragon badge and the model number) and untextured.

The Qualcomm tablet, however, packs a mean punch with its 10.1-inch multi-touch 720p display, 2GB of RAM, and total storage capacity of 32GB. The no-frills, sensible-looking tablet also sports a 13-megapixel rear camera and hold your breath - 7 "Ultrasound" microphones! The device is expected to ship in two to three weeks.

Running on Ice Cream Sandwich, the Snapdragon S4 Pro MDP packs one of the most highly-anticipated quad-core ARM processors (the APQ8064 Snapdragon S4 quad-core chip). One of the biggest pluses of the new APQ8064 platform is undoubtedly the Adreno 320 GPU. This graphics processing unit (GPU) is said to pack two times the punch of its predecessor, the Adreno 225 GPU, and will make gamers trigger happy.

The S4 silicon can also be found in popular mobile devices like the HTC One S and the Samsung Galaxy S3. Additionally, the 4G version of the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity tablet is also expected to have the S4 quad-core chip. The S4 also has four asynchronous CPU cores that clock up to 1.5GHz each!

Hyped as a developer product, the APQ8064 -based MDP tries to justify its lofty $1,299 pricing by including a charging dock with two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, and even Ethernet along with the tablet.

Raj Talluri, senior VP Qualcomm, believes that the Snapdragon S4 Pro will be the highest performance mobile processor out on the market. Great expectations indeed. However, the impact the Qualcomm tablet (with its ambitious pricing) will make remains to be seen.