Google's new tablet promises high performance games at a low cost

Hot on the heels of Microsoft's Surface reveal earlier this month, Google has just announced its own entry in the competitive tablet market: The Nexus 7. The new game-enabled Android tablet runs on Nvidia's new Tegra 3 processor, and carries a price tag of $199 (8GB) to $249 (16GB), putting the device in the same price range as Amazon's Kindle Fire. Until now, the Kindle Fire has ruled over other low cost Android tablets, but Google hopes to change all that with the Nexus 7, as the device promises to offer high performance hardware at the same affordable cost. The Asus-manufactured tablet runs on Android 4.1 (also known as "Jelly Bean"), and includes a 1280 x 800 display, a quad-core Tegra 3 CPU, and a 12 core GPU, allowing developers to create far more complex games for this segment of the Android market. In addition, the Nexus 7 has been completely built around the Google Play marketplace, and with its new tablet, Google hopes to pull users away from the Kindle Fire's Amazon Appstore and back toward its own service. Alongside the new hardware, Google and Nvidia announced that a number of game companies, such as Phosphor Games and Vector Unit, have already begun work on mobile games optimized for the Nexus' Tegra 3 CPU. The Nexus 7 will be available soon, and the Google Play website says the device will ship within two to three weeks.