With Windows 8 coming into the limelight, Google appears to be losing its already shaky position in the tablet market. With Apple set to announce the iPad 3 on March 7th as well, the next-generation Apple tablet will without a doubt further consume whatever tablet market share remains.
Google Play Android 4.0 ICS tablet : A $199 iPad 3 killer?
Now the folks over at AndroidAndMe suggest that Google may have a way to gain some major ground in the tablet wars in 2012. Their weapon? A pure Google experience tablet dubbed the Google Play.
According to the rumors, Google Play will be a 7-inch stock Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich tablet with an ultra-low $199 price tag. Now before you think that this is just another Kindle Fire (which by the way is arguably selling better than any other Android tablet on the market), it is important to note that since it sort of like a “Nexus” device it will supposedly give users the reassurance that it will receive the latest updates for sometime to come. Furthermore, it will include many of Google’s services which were left out of the Kindle Fire such as the Android Market.
So what do you get for $199 other than a tablet built with the stock Android 4.0 OS in mind? In addition to being $300 cheaper than the base iPad 3 (16GB WiFi), it will purportedly be built in partnership with ASUS and include a quad-core Tegra 3 processor.
With Android chief Andy Rubin recently telling The Verge that he wants to win the tablet race, stating that, “2012 is going to be the year that we double down and make sure we’re winning in that space”, a $199 Android tablet with all these qualities may just have what it takes to be the iPad killer tech pundits have been dubbing the latest Android tablets for years now.
We’ve always discussed how Android 3.0 Honeycomb was somewhat of a disappointment, that talk of fragmentation had many potential buyers worried about their choice of Android tablet being left out of the upgrade cycle, and that the higher price tags of Android tablets weren’t working in Google’s favor when it came to competing with the already established iPad. So the Google Play appears to address all these things.
Would you be interesting in a $199 quad-core pure Google experience Android 4.0 tablet? Or do you think that it will still get overshadowed by the iPad and whatever Microsoft is cooking up with its Windows 8 tablet? Sound off in the comments below.
Rumors peg it for a June announcement (Google I/O).
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