“Google announced its first direct foray into the tablet market on Wednesday with the Nexus 7, a 7 inch tablet that will run Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. As we said in our coverage of the product’s launch, the company has completely reset the bar for what to expect for a 7 inch tablet,” Bryan Chaffin reports for The Mac Observer. “Even more interestingly, while the Nexus 7 competes with the Kindle Fire or the Nook Color tablet in terms of size, it also competes with Apple’s new iPad and Surface by Microsoft in terms of specs.”
“The media tablet market just became a two-horse race with Apple’s new iPad as the champion of the high-end, full size touch tablet and the the Google Nexus 7 carrying the Android banner,” Chaffin opines. “Samsung’s Galaxy Tab line and Motorola’s Xoom family might as well pack it up and go home. On the hybrid side, the Asus Transformer line will be fighting for the title of King Toaster-Fridge with Microsoft’s Surface, and may the best device sweep up the crumbs left by Apple and Google.”
Chaffin opines, “Where Google is going to kill it in by eating up every other device out there. Samsung’s sales are going to collapse. Kindle Fire is going to nose dive. Unfortunately, Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color tablet is going to take a hit, too. Nothing on the Android side comes close to the Nexus 7, especially for the price… In short, Google has hit a home run with the Nexus 7. If it can manufacture them in high enough quantities — remember that Asus is the actual maker of this device — it will sell a ton of them. Apple is still king of the full size touch tablet, but the bar has been set if Apple wants to also enter the 7 inch space.”
Much more in the full article, including a detailed spec comparison, here.
MacDailyNews Take: Define “ton.” Why will Google sell a bunch of tiny screen tablets with no apps and fewer content options than Amazon offers when Amazon’s tiny screen 7-inch Android tablet sales have fallen off a cliff after an unsustained surge of Christmastime ignorati suckers? Because of specs? No. Buyers of these cheap, tiny devices are very price conscious – and unconscious about basically everything else except that even the majority of them grasp the fact that Apple’s iPad has all of the apps.
Apple’s $399 iPad 2 scorched Amazon’s Kindle because iPad has the apps, the accessories, AirPlay, and everything else; a vibrant, growing, thriving iOS ecosystem. Apple’s vastly superior product is currently available in tens of thousands of retail stores worldwide and via the Apple Store online, not just on a single Google website. There is no way for prospective buyers to compare Google’s screen to Amazon’s side-by-side!
Apple’s 16GB iPad 2 is only $150 more than Google’s 16GB Nexus 7 and its tiny screen (45% the size of Apple’s). $150. Spend it and gain admittance into a huge ecosystem. Cheap out and be stuck in Fragmandroidland with no apps, a tiny screen, and no genius bar, or anywhere really, to ask questions. Instead of toting around any one of these midget iPad wannabes, you might as well just wear a T-shirt that says, “I’m cheap and stupid.”
What Google will get are the poorest and/or cheapest and/or the most ignorant tablet buyers. In other words, more Android settlers who simply do not buy apps or even know how to upgrade their devices, if they even can upgrade them. That is just not a very enticing situation for developers nor is it conductive to building up a meaningful library of high quality apps.
In this tablet race, Apple owns the track, the fastest cars, and holds all of the keys. The rest are just hoping Apple lets them (by not releasing a 7.85-inch iPad) vie for a distant third place behind the current-gen iPad and the previous-gen iPad.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
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