Google's official 7-inch tablet ready, to ship in June

Google’s got their official mobile handsets that have been co-developed with various handset manufacturers. Now, an official Google tablet is also on the way. We heard about the existence of such a device quite some time back. Digitimes now has a report that states that Google is quite definitely going to start shipping the device, as early as June. The tablet, which will sport a 7-inch display is being developed, along with Asus. Apparently some 600,000 tablets are being manufactured by Asus and these should hit markets soon after they are shipped. Digitimes expects the product to hit stores in July. When Digitimes asked Asus about it they refused to comment. 

Like reference design for Google's Android tablet

Initially, the tablet was said to be ready by May, but things slid back to July due to a number of reasons. Apparently, the design and cost aspects of the tablet weren’t up to the expectations of Google. Changes were required to be made to the initial design, which pushed manufacturing back by quite a bit. After the initial 600,000 units that are expected to ship in the first batch, there are some 2 to 2.5 million units expected  to ship by the end of the year. The 7-inch tablet space is expected to heat up as some of the other manufacturers, such as Samsung, Asus and Acer are expected to launch new models this year as well. 

Amazon, one of the biggest names in the Android tablet space is expected to launch their own line of updated tablets with upgraded specifications in the next few months as well. There’s no official date of launch or price set for the product so far, but it’s expected that the product will be priced around the same as the Kindle Fire. The tablet is expected to be something, like the Asus MeMO ME370T, which was shown off at CES, this year. That tablet sported a 7-inch display as well, along with Wi-Fi support and ICS loaded on it. It’s just not the Android tablet manufacturers who are looking at the 7-inch tablets, Apple, too is expected to launch a small iPad tablet this year.