Rumor: The next Nexus 7 costs $199 and has wireless charging, ultra high resolution screen

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Published 10 May 2013

Google I/O is going to kick off on May 15th, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that we’ll see new hardware at the event. Some sites are claiming we’ll see a refreshed 32 GB Nexus 4 with 4G LTE support for American networks, which is a bold bet. A more obvious hardware release is an updated Nexus 7. According to AppleInsider, who obtained a research note from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the new Nexus 7 is going to make the old Nexus 7 feel like a Nokia 1100.

Specifically, the screen resolution will be bumped up to 1920 x 1200, which is more than 1080p. It’ll have a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro, which might not be as fast as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600, but come on, that’s fast enough. It’ll also have a 5 megapixel camera and wireless charging!

Now all that sounds nice, but how much is it going to cost? Just $199, which I find incredibly hard to believe. That’s an absurd amount of hardware for that price. To give you some comparison, the recently launched Acer Iconia A1 is $179 and comes with a 1024 x 768 display and a quad core chip from MediaTek; same 5 megapixel camera, though probably not the exact same sensor.

Supposedly Google will sell this new Nexus 7 at a loss of between $5 and $10 per unit, taking a page out of Amazon’s playbook. They’ll make up the money by selling content, but that’s risky, especially considering that you can’t buy movies in many markets.

Should you believe this rumor? I say don’t get your hopes up. May 15th isn’t too far off anyway, so it’s not like you’re going to have to wait forever to find out if this is false information.