Hot on the heels of Microsoft's Surface reveal earlier this month, Google has just announced its own entry in the competitive tablet market: The Nexus 7.
The new game-enabled Android tablet runs on Nvidia's new Tegra 3 processor, and carries a price tag of $199 (8GB) to $249 (16GB), putting the device in the same price range as Amazon's Kindle Fire.
Until now, the Kindle Fire has ruled over other low cost Android tablets, but Google hopes to change all that with the Nexus 7, as the device promises to offer high performance hardware at the same affordable cost.
The Asus-manufactured tablet runs on Android 4.1 (also known as "Jelly Bean"), and includes a 1280 x 800 display, a quad-core Tegra 3 CPU, and a 12 core GPU, allowing developers to create far more complex games for this segment of the Android market.
In addition, the Nexus 7 has been completely built around the Google Play marketplace, and with its new tablet, Google hopes to pull users away from the Kindle Fire's Amazon Appstore and back toward its own service.
Alongside the new hardware, Google and Nvidia announced that a number of game companies, such as Phosphor Games and Vector Unit, have already begun work on mobile games optimized for the Nexus' Tegra 3 CPU.
The Nexus 7 will be available soon, and the Google Play website says the device will ship within two to three weeks.
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I am kind of bummed that Google dropped the Micro SD card on their Nexus line. I thought they'd at least put it back in on their tablet; but no big deal though, since there are plenty of other options to choose from and it looks like they're selling this as another portal -- just not a locked down one.
I guess they're trying to push cloud storage?
This is shaping up to be the year of the tablet.
Sad it cost 249 A$ for the 8GB and 299$ for the 16GB in Australia.
Custom tax 5% then 10% GST should only add around 30$ and the AUD is higher than the USD. I wonder where the remaining 20$ came from as the shipping isn't included.