The Google Nexus tablet may have made a guest appearance on a benchmark result site a month ahead of its anticipated release, according to Android Police. The tablet, named "Nexus 7" in the benchmark results, appears to use a Tegra 3 processor and is likely to debut at Google I/O in June.
Rumors about the Nexus tablet have been swirling for the last few months, with the Wall Street Journal reporting in March that Google planned to create an inexpensive 7-inch device to complete with Amazon's $199 Kindle Fire. The tablet would ostensibly be the company's flagship, an analog to the Galaxy Nexus, and possibly sold directly from Google's recently relaunched hardware store.
The telling benchmarks come from Basemark ES2.0 Taiji from Rightware, and show a device named "Nexus 7" manufactured by "asus." Presumably, the 7 points to the device's screen size, which showed a resolution of 1280x768. The benchmarks also indicated it sported a quad-core Cortex A9 NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor clocked at 1.3GHz alongside an NVIDIA ULA GeForce GPU. The device was running Android version 4.1 JRN51B; Android Police speculates that the J stands for "Jelly Bean," meaning that that iteration of the OS may not carry the 5.0 version number after all.
Sources speaking to TechnoBuffalo on May 24 indicated that the tablet would be made by Asus (correct, if the above benchmarks are real), would be priced at $200, and that it would be announced during the Google I/O conference taking place from June 27 to June 29. TechnoBuffalo also points out there is a strong possibility that Google will provide developers in attendance with hardware samples of the new device, as it did with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in 2011.
