Google’s Asus Nexus 7 Tablet Emerges on Benchmarks

Internet giant Google has been long rumored to plan the release of a tablet in the popular Nexus series, while having it manufactured by Asus.

The company hasn’t made an official announcement on the matter for the time being, but the device appears to have just emerged on Rightware's Power Board benchmark result site. The tablet can be seen there with the codename “grouper” attached to it, which is consistent with Google’s manner of naming Nexus devices. Moreover, the model name is Nexus 7, which apparently confirms the 7-inch form factor that this device is supposed to sport, Android Police notes. It also features a tablet-like resolution, namely 768 x 1280 pixels. Additionally, we should mention that the device supposedly features build number JRN51B, where J might stand for Jelly Bean.

The build and SDK are mentioned as version 4.1, which leads to the belief that Google’s next version of mobile platform might arrive on devices as Android 4.1. Android Police also notes that their server logs are already showing instances of Android 4.1, and that there is also reference to Galaxy Nexus phones powered by builds such as JRN54 and JRN54F, supposedly confirming Google’s plans for the next platform release. On the aforementioned benchmarking site, the upcoming Google Asus Nexus 7 tablet is placed 11th, with a score of 18. Of course, it is still work in progress, and the final version might perform better than that. After all, the tablet is expected to pack a quad-core 1.3GHz NVIDIA Tegra 3 application processor.

Some of the latest reports on the matter suggested that Google was looking for initial orders of around 600,000 units from Asus, and that the overall sales projection for the entire year was of 2 or 2.5 million devices. The tablet is expected to feature a low price tag, being capable of competing directly with Amazon’s Kindle Fire and other affordable devices.

Posted in: Preview, Tablet