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It seems like Google loves leaving their fans twitching and squirming.  If the  flying rumors around the internet weren’t enough, Larry Page, current CEO  and co- founder of  Google, added fuel to the fire by teasing Android lovers about the upcoming tablet.In announcing the company’s quarter earning revenue last Thursday,the CEO spoke about tablets in passing.

Nexus Tablet Mockup

Though Page did not outright point the tablet by name, he did drop enough hints to led many to believe he was alluding to the Google branded slate.  When asked how the search giant would improve the sluggish sales performance of the current line of tablets, he believed that steering their attention towards  low cost devices would yield success. He states that Google will be  ”quite focused”  on that space. Google camp has been quite about the tablet for the past months, and its great to see some kind of acknowledgement however vague.

Larry Page also acknowledged Android’s current number 1 tablet (second only to iPad), Amazon’s Kindle Fire, as responsible for taking a substantial market share for Android. The cheap price of $199 can be attributed to its success. Amazon has been taking a loss for each slate sold but banking on their media revenue for profit. While the Kindle Fire has Android 2.3 as the underlying software, it has been stripped of any Google apps and outfitted with Amazon’s products , skins and ecosystem. In taking this route, Amazon has effectively cut Google’s app store (Google Play) revenue and making it their own. In fact its recently come to light that the Amazon App store yielded more profit than Google’s own market. In response Page claims that they may be successful for now, but “not  with the full version of Google Android.”

” I think that we’re very excited about tablets. I think, you know, there’s a number of Android tablets 

out there. Obviously, we have strong competition there as well. I think you’ve seen us really invest substantially in things like Google Play, which really gives you great access to entertainment, media, books and videos and so on, as well as the apps. And we think that’s an important component on 

what we’re doing.

I think there’s also, obviously, there’s been a lot of success on some lower-priced tablets that run Android — maybe not the full Google version of Android. But we definitely believe that there’s going to be a lot of success at the lower end of the market, as well, with lower-priced products that will be very significant. It’s definitely an area we think is quite important and that we’re quite focused on.”

So it should come to no surprise that Google has turned its head to a budget friendly device. Though no details have arised whether the specs would take a hit for a cheaper price, we will soon find out once it’s released this summer.

Sources: Electronista

Android Central