Apple unveiled iOS 6, Microsoft showed off it’s Windows 8 tablets, and now it’s Google’s turn to show off it’s newest products. Starting Wednesday in San Francisco, the company will lay out it’s latest and (hopefully) greatest offerings. There are several items that should be of great interest. First, the Google-Nexus tablet. A 7 inch, Nvidia quad-core device with a 1280×768 screen, and importantly a sub-$200 price tag. Such a tablet will not be an iPad competitor, it will be aimed at the same market as Amazon kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook tablet. Even though it will have much better specs, Google will need to do something to entice the average buyer, who doesn’t know Nvidia from TI OMAP. One way to do that may be introducing Jelly Bean, it’s next version of android, on the tablet. Most rumors have JB being more of an upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich than a brand new os. For those owners of phones and tablets that haven’t seen ICS yet, it would be annoying to have a device out with the next-gen os before you even get the last-gen.
Something else to hope for is Google Assistant. When Apple’s Siri created waves last year, it compelled Google to work on its own voice assistant, which was earlier called the Project Majel. Google was reported to launch the Google Assistant later this year, and thus there is the possibility of the company launching it at the upcoming Google I/O. It is expected to be a voice-powered ‘do-engine’, which will be powered by Google’s own search engine, Google+ social network and Google +1.
Hopefully there will be some things shown that no one expects, which is always interesting.
