Google Nexus Tab Will Change All 7 InchTablets

Neither the hype nor the secrecy was quite the same at Google I/O in San Francisco as it was for Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference or Microsoft’s announcement of the Surface tablet, but it was still what we’ve all come to expect at a tablet-related announcement these days.

This time, Google product managers teamed up to tell the world about Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and all of the reasons why it was a cool thing for mobile devices. Then the hardware guys took over to announce the Google Nexus 7 tablet, which by total coincidence runs Android 4.1.

Google Nexus Tab raises the bar

There’s no question that the 7 inch Google Nexus Tab  is a nice tablet (the 7 is supposed to be written as a superscript like this: Nexus⁷ but nobody’s actually going to do that because it’s too much trouble).

It has most of the right features, including an Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor and a 12-core GPU. There’s an accelerometer and an electronic gyro. It does Near Field Communications, Bluetooth and dual-band WiFi. The Android interface has been redesigned so that it keeps content front and center, sort of like the Kindle Fire.

The content issues should be no surprise since it’s clear that this particular action in the Tablet Wars is aimed at arch-enemy Amazon, which Google apparently finds to be evil because it’s not also featuring Google content. But content is what the Nexus 7 is all about as the company explains on its Google Play ordering page. Priced at less than £159 in the UK, the device isn’t really aimed at the Apple iPad or the Microsoft Surface. But it’s likely that the feature-rich, low-cost device will have an impact on tablet design at those companies.

What the launch of the Nexus 7 does do is add another layer of complexity to the 7-inch tablet field. This isn’t to suggest that a little complexity is a bad thing, since it also means a richer field for product selection. But there are already a LOT of 7-inch Android tablets available, along with some that don’t actually run Android. So what makes the Nexus 7 important?

Reference platform

Perhaps the most important factor is that Google clearly intends the Nexus 7 to be a reference platform. The company bills it as being made for Google Play, and as such it is tied into the cloud-based Google content store and into Google’s cloud. You can store your own content there and you can pay for downloads of video, music, books and magazines. It is first and foremost a content consumption device.

Of course, Google has taken a page from Apple and Microsoft in much of what the tablet can do. There’s a Siri-like service that answers questions in a soft female voice.

It anticipates what you might want from your search history and the information Google knows about you (which might be more than you know about yourself). It will also tie into Google’s other cloud-based packages, from Google + to Google Apps.

While the Nexus 7 isn’t really aimed at enterprise users – Google plainly referred to it as a consumer electronics device in its announcement – it will ultimately affect the enterprise. Some of the features, such as the close integration of search with the calendar, will ultimately prove to be very useful to business users as well as consumers, for example.

Unfortunately, it may not do a lot to beef up the hardware offerings from the likes of the iPad or the Surface. The Nexus 7 only has a front facing camera and there’s no support for external memory. While it will feature an HDMI port, this isn’t going to be the enterprise grade tablet that Microsoft is building. It’s also not an iPad wanna-be, lacking the ability to support LTE (or even 3G as yet) and it lacks anything like a Retina display, for example.

But what it will do is keep the price pressure on the midmarket. If Apple decides to launch an iPad Mini, as has been rumoured, the Nexus 7, along with the Kindle Fire, will set the expected price point. What will more likely happen is that other 7-inch tablets are going to have to up their game and watch their prices carefully. Competing against the Nexus 7 in its own area of the business is going to be tough.

The Nexus 7 will also raise expectations for larger tablets. Some of the features of Android 4.1, such as the vastly improved animation, will make other tablets of all types look clunky. The heavy dependence on the cloud will provide nearly instant access to information, while extracting a heavy price from non Wi-Fi tablet users. But that doesn’t mean that users won’t want smooth animation. It just means that it will provide another way for carrier data plans to annoy users.

It’s worth noting that Google also introduced the Nexus Q, a spherical media center Android computer that’s designed to be controlled by an Android device and make it easier to share media and display it on large screens. The Nexus Q is intended to cement Google into the whole entertainment ecosystem. Of course it will have to fight Apple and Microsoft for this as well. The good news is that eventually most of these capabilities will filter into the enterprise and make things work better there too.

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