San Francisco: Google opened fire on Apple’s iPad and Kindle Fire with a Nexus seven-inch tablet designed to showcase the latest Android software and be a window into its online shop for films, music and more.
The tablet computer will be priced at less than half the cost of the iPad and broadens Google’s arsenal in its battle against Apple, Amazon.com and Microsoft.
The tablet is powered by the latest generation of Android software – Jelly Bean- is being made by Taiwan-based Asus and weighs 340 grams, according to Android team head Hugo Barra.
“We wanted to design a best-of Google experience optimised around the content available at Google Play,” Barra said during a presentation opening.
Nexus tablets were available for order in Australia, Canada, Britain, and the US at the Google Play store at a price of $199 and would begin shipping in mid-July, Barra said. That is the same price as Amazon’s Kindle Fire.
The tablets come with a $25 coupon for Google Play content
Along with the new hardware, Google said it is beefing up its app store to offer more entertainment.
“Google Play is your digital entertainment destination, with more than 600,000 apps and games plus music, movies and books,” a Google blog post said.
“It’s entirely cloud-based, which means all of your content is always available across all of your devices.”
In addition to movie rentals, Google will be offering films for sale. The California-based Internet powerhouse boasted partnerships with major studios such as Disney, Paramount and Sony.
The company described Nexus 7 as “a powerful new tablet” which “makes everything, including games, extremely fast.”
It has a front-facing camera, but no back facing camera.
Android platform developer Chris Yerga said Nexus 7 is also “a serious gaming device.”
While Android has leapt to the top of the mobile phone market, Apple remains dominant in tablets, holding around 62 per cent of the market to 36 per cent for Android, according to research firm IDC.
“Learning a lesson from Amazon, Google can see that the only way to beat the premium-worthy iPad is to go for the millions of customers who are ready for smaller and cheaper tablets,” said Forrester analyst James McQuivey.
After hooking fans with a low-price Android tablet, Google could then direct their loyalty to higher-end devices powered by the operating system and build the ranks of customers at Google Play, the analyst reasoned.
“That range of services will be the secret to stitching together this rag-tag fleet of Android gadgets into a platform that can compete with Apple for minutes of users’ attention rather than premium device dollars,” McQuivey said.
