Report: Next-gen Nexus 7 tablet to cost $149, ship this summer

It’s been nearly a year since Google released its first 7 inch tablet, and now it looks like the company is preparing to launch a second-generation Nexus 7.

Reuters reports that according to sources in the know, Google’s next 7 inch tablet will have better specs and a cheaper price tag than the original. It could ship around July.

According to the news organization’s sources, the new tablet will be made by Asus and feature a 7 inch screen, much like the original. But we may see a number of changes:

• The new Nexus could have a higher resolution display and a thinner screen bezel.
• It will reportedly have a Qualcomm processor rather than an NVIDIA chip.
• Google may set a price as low as $149 for the cheapest model.

At that price, the Google Nexus 7 would be less than half the price of an Apple iPad 2 and even cheaper than the least expensive Amazon Kindle Fire tablet.

Sure, there are some Chinese tablets and models from companies like Coby, Archos, and Ematic that sell for even lower prices. But they don’t tend to have the build quality or specs of a decent Asus tablet or the up-to-date software you get when you buy a Google Nexus product.

In other words, it looks like Google is pricing the new model to move in an effort to grab a larger piece of the tablet pie.

Some of the first Nexus devices (such as the Nexus One and Nexus S smartphones) were designed more to show off Google’s vision of what an Android device could be — but they didn’t take much market share away from Google’s hardware partners such as Samsung, HTC, and Motorola (which Google eventually bought). But the Nexus 4, Nexus 7, and Nexus 10 are priced very competitively.

Reuters suggests that Google is hoping to ship as many as 8 million Nexus 7 units by the end of 2013.