It looks like Nokia Corp. is finally on the home stretch with its first media tablet. At an event in Pakistan, the company accidentally displayed an image of a device that looks just like a tablet. The slate is designed to bridge the gap between Windows Phone smartphones and Windows 8-based personal computers.

The tablet pictured and published by NokiaGadgets seems to have a special frame made of a light metal, which potentially means that the Nokia Lumia slate will feature a unibody-like casing made of aluminum. The tablet is horizontally oriented and presumably is based on Windows RT operating system. The product has rounder corners, but in general its design does not seem to be special, especially keeping in mind Microsoft’s rather strict requirements for thickness of edges and other physical peculiarities of Windows tablets.

Nokia did not officially confirm that the slate picture is actually a Nokia product, and not a placeholder to underline the cross-device nature of Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows Phone 8 operating systems. On the other hand, the pictured table does not look like anything that exists on the market today and its dimensions (against Lumia 620 smartphone) point to 10”-class display that the rumoured Nokia Lumia media tablet presumably has.

Late last year a rumour on the Internet suggested that Nokia would unwrap its first tablet in early 2013. Nokia’s tablet was projected to run Microsoft Windows RT operating system and be based on an ARM-compatible multi-core system-on-chip. The device is expected to be equipped with 10”-class screen akin to that of Surface RT media slate (which means 1366*768 resolution that is considerably lower compared to leading-edge Apple iPhone 4 or Google Nexus 10”). The media tablet itself should be generally similar to competing solution from Microsoft, but Nokia plans to offer a special case that integrates an additional battery and a hardware keyboard, which will make it easy to transform the Lumia slate into a laptop. Belkin offers similar gadget for Apple’s iPad and iPad mini.

In case Nokia actually has plans to unveil a tablet in early 2013, then the company will likely make the announcement at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in February. It is unknown when does Nokia plan to start selling its own tablet.

Tags: Nokia, Windows 8, Windows RT, Microsoft, Windows Phone