With Google having recently cut official support for future major updates on the 2013 Nexus 7, fans of a stock Google interface on a 7-inch screen are left to install custom ROMs, look to subpar hardware, mostly from China, or to find modern devices that can be rooted and have custom ROMs installed. Huawei, maker of the much-loved Nexus 6P, may be coming to the rescue of users who love the Nexus 7 but hate the idea of running outdated software on legacy hardware. According to Evan Blass, the famous and fairly accurate leaker known as evleaks, a spiritual successor to the Nexus 7 is due out before the end of the year, and will be sporting 4GB of RAM.
A few scattered whispers here and there have pointed to such a tablet, but thus far, nobody with quite the track record that Evan Blass boasts, or any more concrete sources, have stepped up to say anything about the rumored tablet. With the recent revealing of Huawei’s MediaPad M3 family, the rumors of Huawei being the maker of such a tablet, if it is to exist, hold a bit of water. Google had previously teamed up with HTC, ASUS, and Samsung to make Nexus tablets. A commenter on Twitter asked if the upcoming tablet would have Nexus or Pixel branding, but their question went unanswered. With this year’s flagship Google phones moving to the Pixel namesake, the same fate for the upcoming tablet is likely.
As with any rumor, no matter how good the track record of the source, it should be taken with a grain of salt. Things like a faulty original source or cancellation later in life could render the rumor false, and details could change over time. Further information on the tablet has yet to be revealed, but with 4GB of RAM and being a Google-made device in either the Nexus or Pixel lineup, somewhat high specs to go with that multitasking-friendly amount of RAM are quite likely. This year’s Pixel phones each sport a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820, the chip du jour as of this writing, which means that it could very well end up in this new tablet, though other options like a MediaTek processor are still possible at this stage.