The Nexus 7 dock is one of those things that we had been hearing a lot about but, we never really understood what took it so long to get to market or even this close. ASUS aren’t saying why it’s taken them so long to get the Nexus 7 Dock ready to go but it’s certainly a little bizarre when you think that ASUS had this and other accessories leak for the tablet way back in July of last year but, it finally looks like the dock will be ready for people to buy very soon.
The dock will cost $39.99 and as we’ve reported before will come with a microUSB input for charging your device as well as 3.5mm stereo out to hook up external speakers or something like that. Now, that doesn’t sound like a very appealing price to us at all and we’re sure that a lot of you reading this will think the same, that this is far too much to pay for a simple dock that offers something you can already buy with existing cables and sort of piece together yourself . There is also support for the pogo pins that are on the Nexus 7 so, there’s no need to get the thing all lined up right when you want to give the Nexus a quick charge, just drop it in to the tablet and it’ll work fine. We’ve seen pogo pins on HTC’s One X and as their own solution proved, it looks like they’re a pricey way to charge a device.
Now, I’m a big advocate of these sort of things, I love the ability to just drop a device into something and have it charge without fiddling around plugging in a cable, and the Pogo pins that are at work here in the dock should allow you to do that quite nicely but, is it really worth 40 bucks? I don’t think it is, maybe $30 at a push but like so many things that Google do when it comes to accessories this seems too little, too late to us. Bizarrely, this is still speculation at this point and The Verge have it on good authority that the dock will be shipping within two weeks from now. I’m afraid that I have some bad news for my fellow UK friends however, as the dock is apparently going to cost £79 in the UK, which if true is a pretty ridiculous price. I’m based in the UK and for £79 I can buy far better solutions for a myriad of devices like this. I’m a bit surprised that Google are allowing the price for an accessory climb so high, especially with the focus on price of the actual Nexus 7 itself.
UPDATE: While the above post original stated that the Nexus 7 dock would cost a crazy £79, we’ve since learnt that the dock should be retailing for £24.99 and go on sale as early as this Friday
[Source: The Verge, KnowYourMobile]