Google announces the Nexus 7 tablet with Jelly Bean, Built and optimized for the Play Store

June 27, 2012

Google announces the Nexus 7 tablet with Jelly Bean, Built and optimized for the Play Store 4

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The Nexus 7 is official folks. It has a 7-inch (1280 x 800) display, a NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core CPU, a 12 core GPU, front facing camera (assuming 1.2MP), 9 hour battery while watching HD video, Bluetooth, WiFI, NFC, and of course it will come with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. It weighs 340 grams, is 10.45mm thick, and as expected, it's built by ASUS. It utilizes NVIDIA’s new low-cost KAI platform that we wrote about previously.

The home screen shows all your content like magazines, and of course you can open any magazine or book and continue where you left off. Within magazine titles, you can look at just the text, but you can also view the pages as they were supposed to with full pictures, and you will have the ability to swipe up or down to expand the text.

There is also a powerful recommendations engine for apps, books, movies, etc. You can set it up to give you recommendations for any category you want, and there is even a Shazam-like feature if you're listening to a song to find out the name of the artist and song with a link to buy it in the store.

The Nexus will be the first device in which Chrome is the default Browser. YouTube, Gmail, Maps, and other Google apps have been optimized for the Nexus 7. For example in Maps you can get information about places before you go. You can even look inside certain restaurants as if you are right there. Google Currents has also been enhanced for the Nexus 7 by adding Google Translate to it so you can see any article in any supported language you want. Gaming is also going to be incredible on the Nexus 7 thanks to the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor.

The Nexus 7 is already available for pre-order for starting at $199 for the 8GB version and $249 for the 16GB version. You will also get a $2o credit to spend in the Google Play Store. Along with that you will get preloaded: Transformers Dark of the Moon movie, the Bourne Domination book, and issues of magazines like Popular Science, Food Network, and Conde Nast Traveler. Shipping is expected to be in mid-July.

So who's ordering? You can order the 8GB here or the 16GB here.

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Robert Nazarian Author

Robert lives in upstate New York where he was born and raised. Technology was always his passion. His first computer was a Radio Shack TRS80 Color that used a cassette tape to save programs, and his first laptop was a Toshiba T1200FB that sported a CGA greyscale screen and two 720kb floppy drives (no hardrive). From the early 90’s through late 2011, he only owned Motorola phones starting with the MircroTAC all the way through to the Droid X. He broke that streak when he bought the Galaxy Nexus. Now he's sporting a Galaxy Note 4, and absolutely loves it. He has a wonderful wife and a 6 year old son. In his free time he enjoys sports, movies, TV, working out, and trying to keep up with the rapid fast world of technology.