We’ve hit the ground running after CES, with a wealth of Android news from around the world. And although that show gave us plenty of new devices to prepare for, the focus of much of this week’s news was rumored devices expected to emerge in the months ahead. (Our money’s on most of these being unveiled at Mobile World Congress in late February, by the way.)

Let’s start by breaking down some of the rumored devices, then we’ll get to some of the other international stories to break this week… Sony Xperia Tablet Z, Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0, LG Optimus G Pro, HTC ‘M7’

First up came the news that Sony could be about to launch a re-vamped 10-inch Android tablet in the week ahead. Reports from Japan suggested that local carrier NTT Docomo hold an event where we’d see the “Sony Xperia Tablet Z.” Rumored specs include a quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, a 1920×1200 display, 2GB of RAM and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. That’d make for a sizeable upgrade over the previous Tablet S, a Tegra 3-based slate that shipped with ICS.

There were Samsung tablet rumors afoot this week too, with sources for SamMobile claiming to have unearthed evidence of an 8-inch Galaxy Note tablet, aptly dubbed the Galaxy Note 8.0. According to the reports, we’re looking at Galaxy Note 2 internals — a 1.6GHz Exynos 4 Quad CPU, 2GB of RAM and 16 or 32GB of storage — inside an 8-inch tablet chassis. Interestingly, the site also says the Note 8.0 will ship with Android 4.2, which would make it one of the first non-Nexus tabs to run the latest version of the OS.

Keep reading…