Mountain View, California — In a novel display of innovation entering into an increasingly crowded and fast-growing market, Google opened fire on Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire with a Nexus 7 tablet designed to showcase the latest Android software and optimized for content from Google Play including books, games, TV shows, movies, apps, magazines, music and more.
Impressively, the new Asus-built Nexus tablet will be the first device to debut with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the newest version of Android launching in mid-July. Besides, the Nexus 7 tablet computer will be priced at less than half the cost of the market-leading iPad and expands Google’s arsenal in its battle against Apple, Amazon.com, and Microsoft to be at the heart of Internet Age lifestyles.
According to the company executive describing the features said, the seven-inch tablet powered by the latest generation of Android software is being manufactured for Google by Taiwan-based Asus and weighs just as much as a paperback book, according to Android team head Hugo Barra.
“We wanted to design a best-of Google experience optimized around the content available at Google Play,” Barra quoted as saying during a presentation opening the Internet titan’s annual developers conference in San Francisco.
The Galaxy Nexus 7 will cost $200 for an 8GB device and $250 for the 16GB version. The new tablet is available for pre-order now in Australia, Canada, Britain and the United States directly from Google Play store and would begin shipping around mid-July, Barra said. That is the same price as Amazon’s Kindle Fire.
Image Credit: (PCWorld)
The announcement, which was made at Google’s I/O developer conference in California, will shove Google into battle with Apple’s iPad and the online retailer Amazon, whose Kindle Fire tablet was launched in the US seven months ago. Costing just $199, Google’s Nexus 7 is both more affordable and physically smaller than many of its rivals.
According to Google’s engineering director, Chris Yerga, said the Nexus 7 was a serious gaming device and that its small size meant it was perfect for emailing, browsing the web and downloading applications.
Apparently, if you have been seriously following the rumors surrounding the Nexus 7 then you already know most of the specs for Google’s first Nexus tablet. The device features a 7-inch screen with 1280-by-800 resolution at 216 pixels per inch, 8GB or 16GB storage, 1 GB RAM, a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor along with Nvidia’s usual 12-core GeForce GPU. The Nexus 7 also features 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, near-field communication, and a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera. Google claims the Nexus 7 offers up to 9 hours of continual video playing and up to 300 hours standby time. The search giant’s new tablet weighs about 0.75 pounds.
In fact, the Nexus 7 will be the first tablet computer to run Google’s latest Jelly Bean Android software.
Nevertheless, Google has made repeated efforts to break into the tablet market, which was mostly dominated by Apple with the launch of the iPad in January 2010. Its first tablet-only software, Android 3.0 — which was known as Honeycomb — was introduced in January last year and was expected to create challengers to Apple’s dominance, but fewer than 10m were sold in the first year, while Apple shipped more than 38m iPads last year.