Google tablet ready but will only be sold starting July 2012

Google has seen good success with their own branded hardware when it comes to smartphones, but like we reported a while back, a tablet is in the works. The Verge now reports that the Android tablet is in fact ready, but Google won’t sell you one until July this year. Google had initially planned to start selling the tablet as early as May. The reason for the delay is the required tweaking to the tablet, which will continue for a while longer. This information comes to The Verge through close sources who know a lot about the tablet. Some of the tweaks are being done to the design to try and reduce the price a bit more.

Possibly the closest to the upcoming Google tablet

The price of the official Google tablet, which according to reports is being built along with Asus has been pegged at roughly $249 (approximately Rs.13,000). The tablet will be sporting a  7-inch display running an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor and the Ice Cream Sandwich powered tablet is said to have Wi-Fi-only connectivity. Google’s tablet won’t be the most inexpensive Android tablet around, though, considering that Amazon’s Kindle Fire sells for roughly $200. Asus is the vendor Google has chosen to work with on the tablet and Google has in the past, worked alongside others when it comes to their official Nexus Android smartphones, including HTC and Samsung. Asus is said to have shown off a tablet with similar pricing and specifications at CES, earlier this year. The MeMO ME370T tablet as it was called too had a 7-inch display running a resolution of 1280x800. If rumours are to be believed, then the Google tablet might just be based on that design and hardware.

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Google recently bought over Motorola’s mobile phone business, but they chose to go ahead and work alongside other companies to build their own tablet. Google isn’t the only one working on value tablets, Apple, too is. We spoke a while back about Apple working on a 7.85-inch iPad variant. Clearly, affordable tablets are in demand now and every company, no matter how large or small wants in on the action.