Google to push the cost of tablets down, regardless of the other brands

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re more than a little surprised that big name manufacturers responsible for Android tablets haven’t responded to Apple’s iPad price drop with urgency. The maker of Android – Google – may be joining us, with a development popping up that could push down the cost of Android tablets whether other manufacturers like it or not.

According to a new report by overseas tech industry website DigiTimes, Google is looking to enter the 7 inch tablet market later this year by introducing an Android tablet of its own to compete against models released by other manufacturers, including Toshiba, Samsung, Acer, and Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

Quite a few of the currently available 7 inch tablets range in price from $400 to $600, higher than some of the 10 inch tablets. For many customers and reviewers, 7 inches is seen as the perfect size for a handheld computer, making the device closer in size to a book or magazine, fitting in handbags and personal luggage more easily than a 9.7 or 10.1 inch device.

Amazon's $199 USD Kindle Fire was never released in Australia, but it has made waves overseas, bringing Android and a tablet experience to customers not willing to pay more than $200 to buy a tablet.

Google’s tablet would likely be named similarly to the company’s Nexus smartphones and would feature a price near that of $199, thereby giving customers a better price with which to dive into the tablet market.

With a less expensive Android tablet, competing manufacturers would have to drop their prices accordingly or risk losing out to Google.

While past Google Nexus smartphones have been built by both HTC and Samsung, Google looks to have tapped Asus for this project, the company behind the well-received Transformer and Transformer Prime tablets.

There’s no iron-clad release date for an official Google tablet as of yet, but rumours suggest that this model could be announced in June to coincide with Google’s I/O conference on June 27th.