Google begun its incursion in the tablet market with the Nexus 7, even if they introduced the first Android version for tablets with Android 3.0 Honeycomb and the Motorola Xoom, the first Nexus tablet directly from Google, was the 7 inch Nexus 7 made by Asus.
Asus has been making some of the best tablets in the market, mostly in its Transformer line of hybrid devices. They know what they’re doing, they have good hardware and good materials without going to the premium prices, but also avoiding the cheap materials thus devaluing the tablet. The Nexus 7 is no exception, it’s made of plastic but its a nice plastic, with a good grip and nice textures, but the pricing was the most incredible thing of all, Google and Asus managed to make a great tablet for the low price of $200. All of the sudden, the market had a high end tablet at a low end price.
And the people responded, the Nexus 7 went flying out of the Play Store and is a huge success in the market selling almost 5 million units in 2012 and estimates of 8 million throughout this year. It might not be iPad level numbers, but still impressive.
We’ve been hearing rumors of Asus being in charge of creating the new Nexus 7 as well, and since they did such a good job with the first one, it made sense, and now its been confirmed by a filing of POSTEL Indonesia, putting the model numbers K008 and K009 along the words ASUS Nexus. It doesn’t specify it’s a new Nexus 7, since it could be just about anything else made by ASUS for Google, like a new Nexus Q or Nexus 10, but we can safely assume by now its the new Nexus 7.
Both models are expected to have the same specs and just be variations of the same tablet, which could either be HSPA+ and 4G LTE models or just 16 and 32 GB. I’m leaning towards the latter, since these models are meant for the Indonesian market and they don’t have an LTE network yet. Google doesn’t seem to be too friendly with LTE devices since that means proprietary drivers and many different antennas to deal with, but we’ll have to see how this one plays out.
The rumors are that it will be a full HD 1080 x 1920 resolution display with a Qualcomm S4 Pro processor like the one inside the Nexus 4, there’s also been speculation that a 600 or 800 Qualcomm chip could end up in the tablet, although the S4 Pro makes more sense if Google wants to keep the price as low as possible. It will probably have a rear camera as well, unlike the original who only had a front facing camera.
Neither Google nor ASUS are talking about the new tablet at the moment, so no names have been thrown around, it will likely be Nexus 7.2 or maybe they’ll just stick to new Nexus 7 and keep everything under a single name and refer to the different models by generations.
It’s also manufactured in China, according to the filing, but that shouldn’t surprise anybody.
I can’t wait for the new model to arrive, the old one was getting pretty old by now and doesn’t seem to play very nicely with Android 4.2.2. How about you? Are you planning on replacing your old model?