It’s not even clear if Google will get directly into the Android tablet business — although its ownership of Motorola kind of makes the point moot. Still, the latest rumour doing the rounds suggests that the maker of a $US199 Google-branded tablet will be Asus.
It’s utter pinch of salt territory, naturally enough, in the same way that it was with last week’s suggestion that the next Nexus handset might be an LG model. As per the rumour, which comes from Android and Me, Asus would produce a 7 inch tablet with a quad-core Tegra 3 processor running a clean slate version of Ice Cream Sandwich to take on the Amazon Kindle Fire.
That last bit I can believe; while the Kindle Fire does technically increase the number of Android tablets on the marketplace, Amazon’s closed store approach to Android cuts Google out of a tasty chunk of revenues on an unmodified Kindle Fire. [Android And Me]