14 DAY TRIAL // A little more than a few weeks ago we reported that Google is planning to introduce its own tablet device in about six months time, and now it seems like this Nexus-branded creation will run the 4.1 version of the Android operating system.
For now, little is known about this upcoming revision of Android, apart from the fact that it seems to introduce a couple of subtle UI changes, meant to improve the usability of Ice Cream Sandwich.
While this is definitely some good news for users, tablet manufactures aren’t equally thrilled.
As DigiTimes reports, these fear that the introduction of the Google Nexus tablet with Android 4.1 will affect the demand for their own Android 4.0 devices since some users may prefer waiting for Google’s tablet to arrive than to buy another product running the first iteration of Ice Cream Sandwich.
So far, Asus was the first company to release a tablet designed for Android 4.0, namely the Transformer Prime, but similar models from Acer, Lenovo and others should also make their appearance in the first part of 2012.
Despite the hardware maker’s fear of the Google’s Nexus tablet, their Android 4.0 devices can also be updated to the upcoming version of Google’s operating system once this becomes available.
Little is known at this point in time about Google’s upcoming tablet, but if we were to guess we would say that this will feature a 10.1-inch display and some sort of dual-core Cortex A9 SoC, although is also likely for it to sport an Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset with quad ARM-based computing cores.
More info should be made available in the coming months, the Mobile World Congress (27 February - 1 March 2012) being a prime candidate for such a product announcement.