We’ve been hearing for a long while now about the fabled Google tablet, presumably called the Nexus 7.
The 7-inch slate will be powered by Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra 3 chip and will be manufactured by ASUS. Perhaps the most important tidbit we’ve learned so far about the Google tablet is its pricing, which will supposedly be in the $150-$250 range. Now that we’ve seen Nvidia’s Kai platform and Acer’s Iconia Tab 110, the $200 price tag seems increasingly probable.
The general consensus is that Google will launch the Nexus tablet at the Google I/O conference taking place in San Francisco at the end of June. But up until now, all we’ve got was speculations and circumstantial evidence.
Now, we are able to confirm to you that ASUS is indeed partnering with Google for the Nexus tablet. An ASUS representative, who wished to remain anonymous, told us during COMPUTEX that the Google tablet will come by the end of June, and that can only mean one thing – Google I/O.
Unfortunately, that’s all we were able to get from the rep, besides the assurance that “it will be awesome”. Not much news really, but it’s always good to hear it from an insider.
The next piece of info that we got is a little more specific. ASUS is in talks with US carriers to bring the Padfone stateside. The bad news is carriers hate it (somehow expected, those tethering fees are basically free money) and, so far, only AT&T is willing to give it a try. Things are going slow on this front, said the ASUS rep.
Moving on, the ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity (TF700) is coming by the end of June in both a WiFi only and an LTE version, which will be picked up by AT&T. We suspected for a while that the Pad Infinity would come on AT&T, based on an appearance that the slate made on FCC. Now we know for sure. We’ve been told that Asus encountered production issues with upstream suppliers, but they are now solved and all the pieces are falling into place for the TF700 launch. The pad will go for $499 but we are not sure if that’s the price of the WiFi-only version or of the LTE version.
This summer is shaping up to be sizzling hot and ASUS’ creations are just a part of it. Don’t worry though, we don’t take vacations at Android Authority. We’ll be here to report on everything!
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