iPad Versus Google Nexus Tablet: What Can We Expect?

By Jonathan Charles | Jun 26, 2012 11:43 AM EDT

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Google's I/O conference begins June 27, and there's every chance the company will unveil the next version of Android - its mobile operating system - called Jelly Bean along with the rumored 7-inch Google Nexus tablet. Any new tablet is going to be compared to the iPad, the market leader. So how does the Google Nexus tablet fare against the iPad?

Design

Reports from Gizmodo Australia, as Mobile & Apps earlier reported, claim the 7-inch tablet will be called the "Nexus 7," perhaps referring to the 7-inch form factor, and will feature a 1.3GHz quad-core Tegra processor, a GeForce 12-core GPU and 1GB of RAM. It will apparently come in two storage sizes - 8GB and 16GB.

The iPad's screen is bigger at 9.7 inches, while the device's A5X processor is clocked at 1GHz - so, in theory, the Nexus tablet should offer faster performance - while the new iPad is rumored to be using 1GB of RAM. It remains to be seen what the user experience will be like on the Google tablet, because though the iPad doesn't offer the latest hardware, the user experience remains consistently good on the Apple tablet. Android devices have been plagued by unoptimized software, resulting in apps hogging performance.

The iPad's minimum storage size is 16GB, rising to 64GB.

Gizmodo also said the tablet will use NFC and Google Wallet. The new iPad doesn't support NFC or an Apple version of Google Wallet. The closest the company has is Passbook, an app for storing all of a user's card information.

Resolution

The display's resolution will be 1280x800 pixels according to the training documents seen by the tech site, which is far behind the iPad's "Retina display" at 2048x1536. There will be a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera - the new iPad's is a VGA camera at 0.3 megapixels - while the device will offer a competitive nine hours of battery life vs the new iPad's 10. Again, that's on paper: the software could decrease the battery life.

Software

Android Jelly Bean - Android version 4.1, not 5.0 as originally rumored - will run on the tablet, perhaps indicating Google won't launch a Google Nexus smartphone with Jelly Bean installed. It's also possible a smartphone and tablet will launch, considering Ice Cream Sandwich was meant to close the divide Honeycomb - which was built for Android tablets - created between tablets and smartphones. The iPad runs iOS 5, with iOS 6 launching this fall.

Pricing

Pricing will be competitive with the Kindle Fire, if the reports are true: in the U.S. it'll retail for $199 for the 8GB version and $249 for the 16GB version. The new iPad retails from $499, while the iPad 2 16GB is available for $399. The Kindle Fire costs just $199.

There's also Microsoft's Surface tablets to consider, whose price hasn't been announced yet. Microsoft said the devices would be competitive with current tablets and Windows ultrabooks for the Windows RT and Pro versions respectively, and there were rumors the pricing will be $599 for RT for Surface and around $999 for Pro for Surface. Note the devices come only in 32GB and 64GB sizes: that's a higher capacity than the 8GB and 16GB mentioned in Gizmodo Australia's report, and the 32GB iPad retails for $599 with Wi-Fi only. The same model at 64GB sells for $699.

Google's I/O conference begins Wednesday, June 27.