It looks like the Google Nexus tablet is a “done deal”, and we can probably expect it to arrive sometime this spring, or at Google I/O in June. But the big news here is that the rumored price went from $250 for the original Asus Memo Tegra 3 tablet, to $200 a bit later, and now down to only $149. So how are they going to achieve this anyway?
First of the the rumor says that they are replacing the Tegra 3 chip for a less expensive one. This could be either an OMAP or a Snapdragon chip. The question is which one? First of all it would have to be better than the one in the Kindle Fire, which is an OMAP 4430. The OMAP 4460 in the Galaxy Nexus could be a solution, though probably overclocked to 1.5 Ghz from 1.2 Ghz in the Galaxy Nexus. This would make some sense because they have already optimized Android 4.0 very well for it.
Another solution would be a Snapdragon chip, and as much as we’d like it to be the S4, if they lowered the price by $100, chances are it’s not one of those. Chances are it’s an S3 chip, again probably clocked at 1.5 Ghz, but it would be about as powerful a regular dual core 1.2 Ghz Cortex A9 chip, because the S3 design is older than Cortex A9 and less powerful.
Even if it’s $150, which is a great price, and it would be an impulse buy for a lot of people, I’d still expect it to have better specs than Kindle Fire, and that hopefully means it retain the 1280×800 resolution from the Memo, and doesn’t lower it to 1024×600 like the Kindle Fire (pixels matter for reading). The processors will probably be more powerful, and will also feature double the RAM at 1 GB.
Storage will probably be the same 8 GB, which should be enough for such a tablet. It would be great to have a microSD slot, too, which the Kindle Fire doesn’t, but Google has been moving away from these lately. I’d still expect the Google Nexus tablet to be a better deal in every way compared to the Kindle Fire, but Google and Asus will still need to do a lot of promotion if they want it to be as successful or more than the Kindle Fire.