It’s been a few days since the second generation ASUS Nexus 7 hit the shelves, so we promptly got our hands on the hot hardware. The successor of the most popular slate in the Android realm is currently available in the United States with an entry-level price tag of $229.

The new Nexus 7 is everything a tablet sequel should be. It is more powerful, thinner, lighter, and better put together. It also comes with a brand new Android version to boot . Read more »

We’ve been down this road before so take this with a pinch of salt. A Windows RT tablet by Nokia showed up in GFXBench scores. The device carried the model name RX-114, RX-108 was a model name associated with Nokia tablet early this year (maybe this Tegra 3-powered tablet).

The benchmark reported a resolution of 1371 x 771 pixels for the screen, presumably a minor error with the real resolution being 1368 x 768, the standard 10.1″ Windows RT tablet resolution. Read more »

The tablet competition is as heated as ever. While Samsung is seemingly taking a break from the race by serving us with a less than competitive recent batch of tablets, we are eagerly looking around to see what the competition will have on offer in the second half of 2013. Amazon still hasn’t announced its bid but we are already seeing reports that the company’s next gen tablets will make use of some powerful hardware.

According to a report, based entirely on industry sources and eye-witness accounts, the next generation of Kindles will include three devices in three different tiers. The highest tier – the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 – will sport the impressive 2560 x 1600 pixel resolution (up from 1920 x 1200 px) and a quad-core Snapdragon 800 chipset. Read more »

If you haven’t experienced it first hand, you must have at least heard about the performance issues plaguing the first generation Nexus 7 tablet that was launched last year. Although the tablet worked wonderfully when it was released, performance degraded rapidly over the course of a year to a point where it became nearly unusable.

That is about to change now with the advent of the Android 4.3 update because it brings just what the doctor ordered for the Nexus 7 to solve its performance issues: TRIM support. Read more »

The Android platform continues its dominance in tablet market with its shipments reaching 24.2 million in the second quarter of 2013. According to a research from Strategy Analytics, Android currently has 67 % of the tablet market, while the Apple owned iOS has declined to 28%. Windows is also on the rise, but has only managed to secure a 4.5% slice so far.

The tablet market has seen a new rise with the overall shipments reaching 36.2 million in Q2, 2013. That’s of course, a significant gain over the same period last year, when 24.6 million tablets were shipped. Read more »

Google recently launched its second-generation Nexus 7 tablet and the slate is already available in Google Play Store and several other major retailers across the United States. Google did not announce the launch date of its Nexus 7 2 for other countries, but now the sign-up page of next-gen affordable tablets have appeared in many countries.

It looks like the new Nexus 7 will next hit the stores of UK, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Spain, Canada, France, Australia and India. Read more »

Samsung has covered almost all kinds of existing tablet screen sizes, but it looks like the South Koreans are planning to take its tablets another step further. According to the popular tipster evleaks, Samsung is working on a 12.2-inch tablet with the model number “SM-P900″.

The Samsung SM-P900 is said to feature a 12.2-inch display with a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels. A leaked user agent profile had earlier suggested a mysterious device with a similar resolution, so SM-P900 could well be a device in the making. Read more »

It would be a big shame if something on your brand new Nexus 7 2 broke, but as it turns out if it did, it wouldn’t be too hard to repair. iFixit took the new 7” Google tablet apart and awarded it a repairability score of 7/10.

The team also took apart a Chromecast, but mostly out of curiosity – the $35 stick is made out of a plastic enclosure and a motherboard, there’s nothing to repair there. Read more »

When Google announced the new Nexus 7 2, the team promised an almost double (1.8x) increase in performance for the CPU and a quadruple jump for the GPU over the original. Note that the number of pixels on the screen more than doubled with the move to WUXGA resolution.

So, what do the benchmarks show? Read more »

Google unveiled its second-generation Nexus 7 tablet a couple of days ago and the company had announced that the Nexus 7 2 will be available in US from July 30. However, Best Buy one of the official retailers of the slate has jumped the gun and has started shipping out the tablet to those who pre-ordered it.

The Nexus 7 is also available in the Best Buy stores if you are planning to pick it up in person. Read more »

Apple reported that iPad sales had declined in the company’s third fiscal quarter this year from 17 million last year to 14.6 million. Now analysts from Citi Research say that Apple’s tablets will continue to lose market share even when the new iPad 5 and new iPad mini are announced.

Opposite to the iPad’s decline, the overall tablet market was on the rise during the third quarter. The expectation for the fourth quarter is for iPads to decline 7% year on year. Read more »

The Nexus 7 refresh introduced by Google yesterday is now up for preorder in the UK. Unfortunately the availability news isn’t great with Britain residents having to wait until September to get the hot slate.

The tablet will be priced at £199.99 for the 16GB model, and £239.99 for the 32GB variant. Read more »

Sony has decided not to waste any time and push the freshly announced Android 4.3 Jelly Bean as part of its Android Open Source Project (AOSP) for the Xperia Tablet Z.

Sony Community manager Marcus Hansson says that Sony developers began work only after Google made its Android announcement at the event yesterday just to get the latest Jelly Bean version running on the Tablet Z. As a result, not all of the Android 4.3 functionality works just yet. Read more »

The second-generation Google Nexus 7 is now official and the company has launched a promo trailer to go with it and try to convince you to buy one, if the specs of the device didn’t already do that job.

Entitled “Fear Less”, the new Nexus 7 promo video is not only inspirational, but also quite smart and nicely made, showing a young boy’s fight with anxiety of public speaking. Read more »

At today’s “breakfast with Sundar Pichai” event, Google announced that its mobile operating platform – Android now powers 70 million tablets across the globe.

Google also claims that the market share of Android tablets is close to 50%, with “almost one in two tablets sold worldwide” in the first half of this year running on its mobile platform. Read more »