Google gets deeper into hardware with new 8 inch android tablet-Priceangels.com
Google Inc on Wednesday showcased a new-generation, slimmer 8 inch android tablet that the Internet search company hopes will expand its presence in consumer hardware, and ensure that its online services remain front-and-center on mobile devices.
The latest 8 inch android tablet, featuring a Qualcomm Inc Snapdragon processor and a higher display resolution, on July 30 will be priced at $229 for a basic version with 16 gigabytes of storage. The original year-old tablet started at $199 for an 8 gigabyte version.
Sundar Pichai, head of Android and Chrome software, said on the sidelines of an event to launch the tablet that the Internet company would make a profit off the new product. The first-generation 8 inch android tablet, which marked its initial foray into mobile electronics, was financially a break-even product for the company, analysts have said.
Google and other traditionally non-hardware companies such as Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp have begun making inroads into mobile devices as consumers increasingly access the Web on the go. It introduced its first tablet in June 2012, hoping to replicate its smartphone success in a hot market presently dominated by Amazon's Kindle Fire, Apple Inc's iPad.sty5Dqdf3
Google, which gets the lion's share of its revenue from online and mobile advertising, wants the aggressively priced Nexus tablets to be a hit as more users would mean increased exposure for its ads.Its Nexus line, which include smartphones and tablets made by partners like Samsung Electronics and HTC, also serve as references for manufacturers across the globe adopting its Android mobile software system.
On Wednesday, Pichai told reporters that, since its launch, the 8 inch android tablet line alone has accounted for greater than 10 percent of all Android tablets sold.The company was on track to see 70 million total Android tablet activations in 2013, versus a pace of about 10 million at the end of 2012, he said.
According to Google, there will be more than 70 million Android tablets activated around the world by the end of 2013. Looking ahead, the next-generation 7 inch android tablet and other low-cost tablets should continue to build momentum around the platform. If Google can work its partnerships, it can seed more devices in universities and schools. However, it's more likely that Google is counting on low-cost hardware and deep textbook discounts to lure students organically -- their parents, too.
The 7-inch Asus tablet now sports a 1920 x 1200 resolution display with a pixel density of 323ppi, up from its predecessor's 1280 x 800 216ppi screen. Underneath the hood of the new tablet is a quad-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro processor and 2GB of RAM — the previous year's model utilized a 1.2GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 CPU and 1GB of RAM. Battery life on the new tablet is expected to get you 9 hours of HD video or 10 hours of web browsing.