Despite the fact that ‘the Nexus 7’ sounds a bit like some kind of sci-fi meets wild-west action flick, the new Nexus tablet unveiled by Google at its 2012 I/O conference looks all kinds of promising. From the outset we’ll justify that statement with the Nexus’ price tag of just $199 for the 8GB model and $249 for the 16GB. This is not a ‘premium’ tablet; it’s a low-end contender that sports specs which could give the higher end of the market a run for its money.
Weighing in with a 7 inch 1200x800 HD display, NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor, 12-core graphics processing unit (GPU), NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 9 hours of battery, Google has pretty much destroyed any chances the Amazon Kindle Fire ever had of future sales.
On top of all of this, the Google Nexus 7 will come running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, compared to the Kindle Fire’s paltry Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system (OS).
The Google Nexus is nothing short of an impressive achievement by Google. It looks fast, relatively smooth and extremely functional. It may not be an iPad-killer, but that’s kind of the beauty of it; it was never meant to be. Google seems to have made the decision to pull back and focus on the lower-end of the market, pretty much the only area in tablets where it’s been selling competitively.
It’s a good decision, because without trying to appear to biased Android tablets have simply not been on par with their contemporary iPads in terms of fluid user experience. Now Google has some wiggle-room at the lower-end. It can still work on improving its tablet offerings without having to suffer defeat after crippling defeat at the hands of the iPad.
Oh, and the Nexus 7 is already available for pre-order with an expected mid-July shipping date. The pre-order comes with $25 of Google Play store credit, Transformers Dark of the Moon (film) and The Bourne Dominion (book).
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