Google Unveils Nexus 7 Tablet from Asus

Google cleared the air on the speculation of a new tablet branded Nexus 7 during the Google I/O 2012 conference in San Francisco. This ends the suspend of a leaked photo that has been circulating around the social media spaces hours before the conference. The announcement was made together with the new release of Android 4.1 codenamed Jelly Bean.

The Nexus 7 tablet is built for Google Play, Google’s very own platform for apps and content distribution, a marketplace for all Android devices. It has a 7-inch, 1280×800 HD display, a quad-core Tegra 3 processor, 12-core GPU, and 1GB RAM. The tablet will also have a 1.2-megapixel front facing camera with NFC. Google boasts of a nine hour HD movie playback and up to 300 hours of standby time. Truly and amazing achievement (at least on paper) especially as The Nexus 7 only weighs 340 grams.

The Nexus 7 starts at $199 for the 8GB and the 16GB model is available at $249. US residence can now pre-order the tablet starting today from play.google.com and it will ship mid-July. However, there’s no news when the Nexus 7 will be available in Malaysia.