Gizmodo, an Australian technology site I occasionally read has posted a scoop on what may well be Google’s foray into the tablet market, called the Nexus. It’s built by Asus and boasts a 7″ screen, a Tegra 3 CPU running at 1GHz, 1GB of RAM, and comes with either 8GB or 16GB of storage. It also runs Google’s latest incarnation of it’s Android OS, code-named Jelly Bean.

I don’t follow the tablet market at all, but I do have an Android phone and a first generation iPad. They are both fun devices but the phone is constrained by the hardware and sometimes slow and tricky to use. The iPad has proven to be nothing more than an expensive web-client which is useful enough but not for the original price of $700 or so.

The Google Nexus is of some interest to me for three reasons. Firstly, the supposed price, just US$199 for the 8GB model and $249 for the 16GB model. Secondly, developing for the Android OS is a much shallower learning curve than for the iPad. I’ve been doing on and off research on developing in .NET for Android using something like Mono for Android. Finally I am not too keen on the requirements for listing of apps in the Apple Store. Seems like a lot of hoops to jump through.

Oh, I guess I should own up to one final reason I like the idea of this tablet. At just $249 it’s not too much money to blow on what will be, essentially, a toy 🙂