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The above benchmark image displays the scores of a tablet that isn’t known to exist. The supposed tablet is manufactured by HTC and called the Vertex, although this could be an internal code name and not the name of the device that will hit the market. Powered by a Tegra 3 processor, the “Vertex” would then pack the same punch as the popular HTC One X smartphone (international version). It’s been a while since HTC has had a proper tablet on the market and their only two attempts to grab a piece of the lucrative market, the HTC Flyer and the HTC Jetstream, were met with a resounding lack of success for a variety of reasons.

The lack of a tablet for the year thus far coresponds with HTC’s promise earlier this year that they would focus on making fewer devices, each of a high quality, rather than making a multitude of devices at the expense of quality. The approach has proven a success with the popularity of the HTC One series of smartphones, primarily the One X/XL, which has garnered positive reveiws across the board.

The screen resoultion of the tablet which produced these benchmarks is 1280×752, which, although the standard on the tablets of last year, has since been replaced with 1080p panels such as those on the Acer Iconia Tab A700 and Asus Transformer Pad Infinity. When combined with HTC’s commitment to focus on quality and the relatively low clock speed of the Tegra 3 CPU (1.3GHz vs 1.4 GHz on other tablets), it seems that this is a budget tablet. Also, when you consider the failure to penetrate the mass market of 10″ budget tablets and the success of Amazon’s Kindle Fire, all indications point to the HTC “Vertex” being a low cost 7″ tablet from HTC, built to directly compete with Google’s and Asus’ Nexus 7.

At the moment, all this is pure speculation based on a benchmark result that could easily have been faked, so please take this with a tablet-sized grain of salt. So what do you think? If this were a competitor to the Nexus 7, would you buy it? And if it were a full sized 10″ slate, would the low resolution put you off? Let us know in the comments!