Google Unveils $399 Nexus 10 Tablet
From The Wall Street Journal:
Google Inc. on Monday unveiled a new $399 tablet and smartphone powered by its Android mobile operating system, as the Internet giant continues its quest to crack Apple Inc.’s grip on the tablet market and keep other rivals at bay.
Google said the devices are part of an expansion of its line of “Nexus” devices, which Google sells through its online store and co-develops with hardware partners to show off the latest version of Android.
. . . .
The Nexus 10 tablet, manufactured by Samsung Electronics Co. comes with a 10-inch screen and is priced at $399 for 16 gigabytes of storage. The device will be Google’s most serious attempt to compete with Apple’s latest, full-size iPad, which sells for $499.
The Nexus 10 will go on sale Nov. 13 through the Google Play online store.
. . . .
In the tablet market, Android has made some gains. Research firm Gartner projected that Android-powered tablets would capture 40% of global tablet sales this year, up from 30% last year, thanks to the Nexus 7 and Amazon Inc.’s Kindle Fire tablet.
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I can’t understand why they don’t include a microSD card. 16 gigs is fine for ebooks, but what about music? Movies? Sigh. Looks like a lovely tablet, otherwise.
Agree. I expanded my phone with a microSD card. There shouldn’t be much of a technical hurdle to incorporate an additional microSD slot for tablets, I wouldn’t think.
Google don’t want you downloading movies to your tablet, they want you watching movies on Youtube. How else will they track what you’re doing to send you targeted ads?
The iPad’s do not have a microSD slot either and they are the competition. SD/microSD is another thing for other Android tablet manufacturers to add that Google did not, there has to be some reason to buy some other brand. Plus you can get an OTG cable to give you a full sized USB port and then use a flash drive. OTG cables are cheap on Amazon.
Of course now we find out that Google has multi-user support in Android 4.2 and SD card support doesn’t play well with it. The reason is SD cards need to be formatted with FAT,the old MSDOS file format, so they will inter operate between devices. Even if you don’t intend to take the SD card out and use it in other devices, Google has to assume you will and people will do it. FAT does not include multi-user support and many Android apps have treated SD card storage as just more storage for a single user, so everything gets messed up when multi-user support comes in. Anyway, there is a real technical reason for not having SD card support going forward so it might disappear from other Android tablets as Android 4.2 becomes the norm.
P.G.
I’ve heard people griping that you can’t use the extra screen resolution on these beasts. I dunno, all the Ipad will give me is 480 with the latest movie I bought, whereas it’s available on some devices with 1280.
With every real step forward with graphics, I have noticed the difference. My old eyes really appreciate the delineation of colours and shapes.
For the money, and for a good few other reasons related to open source, I’m certainly headed in this direction if/when the Ipad expires. (All *I* things fall over and die after two years, don’t they?)
brendan
(2 year lifespan? Not in my experience. iPhone 1: lasted till iPhone 4S, and probably would’ve been fine for a while longer, but the battery was getting a little twitchy and I’d managed to put a fine crack on the screen. iPad 1: still going strong, though I suppose it’s not quite long enough to tell if it’s gonna keel over in 2013. If I keep playing MineCraft with the kid, I might still futz the battery, I suppose.)
If you use your Apple products as a fashion statement, you definitely need to replace them every two years, Brendan.