Nexus 7: A $200 Android Tablet

At its Google I/O conference, Google unveiled its first tablet: the Nexus 7! Contrary to what you might have thought, this tablet doesn't seem to want to compete with Apple and its iPad. After all, that's not really its primary aim.

The first thing is that the Nexus 7 is a 7-inch tablet (compared with 10 inches for the iPad). So it won't be used in the same way. In fact, the Nexus 7 is more of a tablet designed for everyone, even those with less money, as it is sold for $199. But despite this low price, the machine is not an entry-level tablet like the Chinese brands, for example. It is equipped with a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor.

This tablet from Google (and in collaboration with Asus) is equipped with a 1.3 megapixel camera capable of shooting 720p video (enough for video conferencing). As mentioned above, it has a 7-inch screen with a fairly good resolution of 1280×800. That's a long way from the new iPad, but when you compare it with the non-Retina MacBook Pro, for example, it's not bad at all (same resolution for a 13-inch screen). For $199, you get 8GB of memory, and 16GB for $50 more (note that you can't put a microSD card in there).

By bringing out a tablet of this size, Google is obviously aiming for mobility. As well as being able to fit in a jacket pocket or even the back pocket of a pair of jeans, the Nexus 7 is very light (340 grams compared with 650 for the iPad). And despite this reduced weight, the Nexus 7 has a claimed battery life of 9 hours (initial tests have shown Google to be right).

Of course, the Nexus 7 runs on Android, but on a brand new version: 4.1 Jelly Bean! Basically, there aren't any major changes, but this update does bring its share of new features, in much the same way as iOS 6 did.

P.S.: You should know that Google says it's selling the tablet at cost price and that the profits will come (we hope for their sake) from Google Play.