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Up until very recently, rumours of Google building a premium ‘Nexus’ tablet device were exactly that – rumours. However, test results have surfaced online that show that such a product is very real.
We’ve heard plenty of reports in the past couple of months that hint at Asus being the manufacturer of choice for Google when building a Google-branded tablet – presumably due to the successes of its Transformer tablet series. However, a recent report from the Wall Street Journal threw a spanner into the works, claiming that Google would use 5 manufacturers to create different Nexus devices.
We can now place a tick next to Asus on that list, as benchmark results for a 7-inch tablet with the model number ‘Nexus 7’ appeared online. It’s not clear exactly who ran the tests, but benchmarking software Basemark was used to test the processing and graphical power of the mystery device, leading to its reveal.
With Asus building the device for Google, the Nexus 7 is likely to bear the Google name rather than its maker’s. It’s also thought that it will be one of the first devices to run a new version of Android when it launches, which will almost certainly be called ‘Jelly Bean’ – version 4.1 or 5.0.
A line of code in the benchmark results give away that the next big update to Android is likely to be version 4.1:
“display”: “XXXXXX-userdebug 4.1 JRN51B 3XXXXX dev-keys”
The 4.1 links to the firmware version and many believe that Google’s not-so-secret tablet is currently being tested with a new version of Android which could launch later in the year.
The 7 in ‘Nexus 7’ points towards a 7-inch screen being used in the device, which will feature a resolution of 1280 x 768 pixels. This means that Google is not gunning for the iPad market, rather it seems to be trying to rival Amazon’s popular Kindle Fire device.
From the results it seems that Google will be using a powerful quad-core Tegra 3 processor from Nvidia to power its first tablet, which will run at 1.3GHz.
Stay tuned for the latest on Google’s rumoured tablet!
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Via: AndroidPolice
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