Google Barely Making any Money off of the 8GB Nexus 7 Tablet

Today Google unveiled a highly rumored Nexus 7 Tablet. Setting its sights on the competitor Kindle Fire Tablet, the 7-inch device weighs in at a reasonable 12 ounces and is slated at a base price point of $199 USD. Built with scratch-resistant Corning glass, the Nexus 7 has a 1280×800 IPS display and links up via GPS, Bluetooth, 802.11b/g/n WiFi and Micro-USB. Furthermore, the Google Nexus 7 will run on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean). Those in the market can expect orders to begin shipping mid-July 2012But the feature that will probably be the most enticing to consumers is the price. The Nexus 7 sells for $200 with 8GB of storage. That’s the same price as the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet at the same storage capacity. If you want a bit more room to download HD movies, music, games and apps, you can get the 16GB version for $250. At these prices, the Nexus 7 is frankly a steal when you compare it to what else is out there at the same cost.




The 1280×800 IPS touchscreen is beautiful. It’s the best display I’ve seen on a 7-inch tablet, and almost as good as the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity and the third-generation iPad. It’s not quite Retina display quality, but with a pixel density of 216ppi, it’s very close. Colors are balanced without being over-saturated, a common issue on many mobile devices nowadays, particularly those from Samsung.




Also absent are any software performance problems. Where the Fire and Nook suffer from unresponsiveness, slow animations and stuttering screens, the Nexus 7 screams. In fact, Google’s tablet responds as quickly and scrolls as smoothly as just about any tablet I’ve seen, no matter the size. It feels as fast as Asus’ larger Transformer tablets, and it performs as smoothly as the iPad, even when playing high definition games such as ShadowGun or playing back HD movies.




Basically, the Nexus 7 is a beast. Navigating around Android 4.1 Jelly Bean (yes, this is the first Jelly Bean tablet) is super clean. There’s no hesitation on the part of the Nexus 7 when loading magazines, books, apps, video, games, music or web pages.




This can be attributed to Nvidia’s 1.2GHz Tegra 3 quad-core processor — yep, this is the first quad-core 7-inch tablet, too. Alongside that is a 12-core Nvidia GPU and 1GB of RAM. The only noticeable delay comes when you first turn on the Nexus 7. .