It wasn’t all that long ago that Google announced its Nexus 7, a $199 10″ tablet built by Asus — it’s only around 13 months old. But so much has happened in tabletland since then that the Nexus 7 feels a bit like an old-timer. Lots of folks expected Google to replace it back in May at the company’s I/O conference. It didn’t. But at an event this morning in San Francisco, the company rolled out a new 10 inch android tablet. The name remains the same, but otherwise, an awful lot has changed.
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As its name suggests, this is still a tablet with a 10″ screen. It’s also still based on Asus hardware. But it’s svelter than its predecessor: 2mm thinner, almost 6mm narrower and 50 grams lighter. And Google packed far more pixels into the new tablet’s display real estate. It’s going from 1280-by-800 pixels and 216 pixels per inch to 1920-by-1200 pixels and 323ppi, giving it true HD resolution and making it, Google says, the highest-resolution 7″ tablet to date. (Apple’s iPad Mini has a bigger screen but far fewer pixels — 1024-by-768 — and barely over half of the new Nexus 7′s pixels-per-inch.)

Inside, the new tablet has a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor with 1.8x the computational oomph of the old one. It has double the RAM — 2GB — which should also boost performance, especially if you’re juggling multiple apps and/or browser tabs. sty5Dqdf3

Oh, and the tablet also has a new price. Instead of starting at $199, it’s a $229 tablet. (Yes, Google is opting out of the $199 tablet wars it kicked off with the first 10 inch android tablet.) That gets you 16GB of storage. For $269, you can upgrade to a 32GB model; for $349, you can buy a 32GB unit with unlocked 4G LTE, which works on AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. The Wi-Fi-only models will be available on July 30 from the Google Play store and will be broadly available at retail stores; the LTE one will follow “in the coming weeks.”

The original Nexus 7 was the tablet that pretty much snapped the Android-tablet market out of its doldrums. As an improved model of the original at a higher price, the new version is unlikely to be anywhere near as influential. But it does look pretty snazzy, and reasonably priced for what you get. More thoughts once I’ve had a chance to try one for myself.

Wi-Fi only versions will go on sale in the United States on July 30, with Q88 Android Tablet to be released in France, Australia, Britain, South Korean and a few other countries in "coming weeks."Nexus 10 will be the first tablet powered by a new 4.3 version of the Android "Jelly Bean" mobile operating system."We from the Android team are investing a lot in tablets," said Sundar Pichai, who heads the Android and Chrome teams at Google.

"By our count, almost one in two tablets sold worldwide is based on Android."More than 70 million tablets powered by Google's Android software have been activated worldwide, according to Pichai.Prices are falling for most tablets as sales surge, with many analysts expecting tablets to outpace PC sales soon. ablet shipments are expected to grow 67.9 per cent to 202 million units this year, according to a Gartner report.

 

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