Refreshed Nexus 7 "coming soon" to India

Just a couple of days after the official unveiling of the much-awaited refresh to the Nexus 7, Google has made it official that the tablet will be making its way to India. On the company’s Nexus 7 website , the refreshed tablet is listed as “Coming Soon” to the country. Other than this news, the page is pretty lacking in details. It does, however, give users the option of signing up to a newsletter that would notify them of updates.

Along with this, Google has also made a slight change to its earlier Nexus 7 listing on Google Play. The tablet is now listed as Nexus 7 (2012), presumably to help customers distinguish between the two versions of the tablet more easily.

Sadly enough, there’s no release date

The refreshed Nexus 7 was unveiled just a couple of days ago at the Breakfast with Sundar Pichai event. The newer model, made by ASUS as well, will start shipping as soon as July 30.

In addition to the hardware changes, the new Nexus 7 will run the latest version of Android, 4.3 Jelly Bean, which was also unveiled yesterday. The newer tablet is about 2mm thinner and 50g lighter than the older Nexus 7. In a major improvement over the last-gen model, the display on the sleeker tablet will have a 1920x1200 resolution with a pixel density of 323 ppi. The 7-point touch IPS panel is supposed to be not just scratch resistant, but also fingerprint smudge resistant.

The Nexus 7 also has new internals, with the tablet being powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro SoC, which has four Krait cores clocked at 1.5GHz along with Adreno 320 GPU and a healthy 2GB of RAM. In a significant bump from the previous version, the newer Nexus 7 will have dual stereo speakers with 5.1 audio.

As far as the cameras on the tablet go, Nexus 7 has a modest 5MP rear camera and a 1.2MP front-facing one. The tablet will also sport Bluetooth 4.0, NFC and dual-band WiFi capabilities. The tablet has a 3,950 mAH battery that will last you for a good nine hours of active use and can be charged wirelessly.

The refreshed Nexus 7 will come in 16GB and 32GB WiFi variants with an additional LTE version also available. The 16GB WiFi Nexus 7 will be priced at $229 (approx Rs 13,500), the 32GB variant will set you back $269 (approx Rs 16,000) and the 32GB LTE Nexus 7 is priced at a slightly steep $349 (approx Rs 20,500).