Google Nexus 7 Tablet On UK Pre-Order For £159

The long-awaited 7 inch Google Nexus tablet, made by Asus, will be on sale in July, and its Project Glass augmented reality spectacles will hit the market in 2013. The Google I/O conference in San Francisco also showed a ball-shaped media hub and dock for Android devices, called the Nexus Q.

The Google Nexus 7 tablet can already be pre-ordered in the Google Play store with deliveries expected in July (the site says “shipping in two to three weeks”). . The £159 price for an model with 8GB of storage confirms this is a model designed to compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire rather than the high-end iPad, as does the heavy emphasis on media consumption in the form of TV shows and movies. A 16GB model costing £199 can also be ordered.

Google Nexus tablet details

Running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, The tablet has a 4325mAh battery rated to give it eight hours of life, a quad core Tegra 3processor with a 12 core GPU, and a 1280×800 display. It will weigh 340g, and will ship with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but no 3G connectivity (similar to Microsoft’s planned Surface tablet).

Google showed the new features in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, which include better performance (technology called Project Butter has increased the frame rate to 60fps), more search features and more options in arranging application icons on the home screen. It also has voice typing and a new system of notifications for appointments and reminders.

The spherical Nexus Q media hub connects to a TV and home entertainment centre, and uses the Internet to get content from Google Play. It can be controlled by an Android tablet or smartphone. Coloured LEDs round its midriff pulse with the sound being played.

Project Glass was demonstrated again, and Google promised the augmented reality glasses would be available for sale early in 2013, at an expected price of $1500.

“Nexus Q is a small Android-powered computer that’s designed to live in your home,” said Android engineer Joe Britt. It can be pre-ordered in the US for $299 (£191) but is not yet announced for the UK.

Existing Android tablets including the Galaxy Nexus, Motorola Xoom and others, will get Jelly Bean through over-the-air downloads, and Google promised to release Jelly Bean to the open source community in mid-July, Google said. The current Android version, Ice Cream Sandwich, was open sourced in November, following criticism for delays to the release of the previous vesion Honeycomb.

Developers will have a software development kit (SDK) for apps to run on Jelly Bean, while hardware makers will have a platform development kit (PDK) to help get Jelly Bean running on their products.

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