Google Hots Up Tablet Market With Launch Of Nexus 7 Tablet For $199

As reported by us in our earlier blogs that Google is on the verge of launching its 7″ inch tablet to take head on with Kindle Fire tablet and to some extent with Apple’s iPad, Google has turned this speculation into reality yesterday by unveiling its 7 inch tablet called Nexus Seven in San Francisco.

Nexus 7 tablet will be manufactured by Taiwan’s AsusTek Computer. This tablet will  run the next version of Google’s Android operating system – Jelly Bean. It is also designed specifically for Google Play, the company’s online store for movies, music, games, books and apps.

Google also showcased the new 4.1 “Jelly Bean” version of Android operating system at the SFO event.  The new software delivers faster performance and new features such as “voice search”.

The tablet features a 7″ inch screen with a resolution of 1280×800 pixels. It is powered by a Tegra 3 quad-core CPU and 12-core GPU. The device also has a front-facing camera. It also features Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and NFC. The Nexus 7 tablet offers up to 9 hours of HD video playback on a single charge and 300 hours of standby. The super thin tablet weighs just 340 grams and can fit into one hand.

The device is available for purchase online from Google Play and comes with 8 GB of storage for $199 or 16 GB for $249. The purchase also entitles the buyers $25 in credit for the Google Play store, a copy of the movie “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” the eBook “Bourne Dominion,” and subscriptions to various magazines, including Popular Science. This device will be shipped in mid-July and is available to customers in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia. When Indian customers will have the opportunity to lay its hands on this tablet, is not known yet.

According to Google, 1 million devices using its Android mobile software are being activated every day. This has led Google into expanding its portfolio to hardware and they have come out with Nexus 7 to give stiff challenge to Amazon.com’ s Kindle Fire tablet, which has taken a chunk of Apple’ iPad market, since its launch last year. Google probably is of the view that everybody can’t afford iPad which starts at $ 499 and their device will be ideally suitable for first time buyers of tablets and those geeks who prefers to go in for Android tablets only. Nexus 7 will also pose severe problems for Microsoft’s Surface tablet which are still to be launched commercially.

With the arrival of Nexus 7, tablet market will see lot of upheavels and coming months will be very exciting for users and media analysts to write and experiment a lot with new devices.