Google Nexus Tablet Launches Next Week – Tech Thursday

I sense a war coming on. A war for tablet sales to get consumers to buy their product and to try and dethrone the king, the iPad. It's not a spin off of Game of Thrones, but it might as well be as Google gets ready to unveil it's own brand tablet. And with the announcement of the Surface tablet just earlier this week, it's looking to be a vicious one.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt announced the tablet was going to be coming, back in December. Looks like now, according to a couple different articles, that it'll be unveiled at the Google I/O developer's conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center, June 27-29. The 7 inch tablet is said to be priced at $199 and is produced by Quanta Computer. According to the sources cited in the articles, the tablet will only support WiFi because of it's 7 inch size and only a front facing webcam for video conferencing. It'll also come preloaded with Google's Chrome Browser.

One question that is being brought up is how this will affect their partner Android tablet makers, like Samsung. The Galaxy Tab is one of the more popular Android models. Is this going to hurt their sales in the end with Google making their own? And this seems to be a new trend to follow Apple with designing and building the hardware and developing the software all in house. It used to be a company would find a decent device with specs the company liked, partnered with the manufacturer and then develop the software for the hardware. But now Google and Microsoft have taken the other approach. Should be interesting to see how they do, but I doubt they'll dethrone the iPad. This will end up being a tight fight for second place.

$>logout