Google Nexus 7 vs. Amazon Kindle Fire, At Google I/O 2012, the search giant announced its newest mobile operating system, Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean," and with it a new 7-inch tablet aimed not at the current top dog, the new Apple iPad, but rather at the budget-friendly Amazon Kindle Fire.
The Google branded tablet from Asus, dubbed the Nexus 7, is priced at $199 and will be available directly through Google Play. So how do these two tablets stack up? Read on for our side-by-side comparison.
Let's just get this out of the way right now: From a pure spec standpoint, the Nexus 7 is the superior tablet in nearly every way. The 1,280-by-800-pixel display on the Nexus 7, while not up to the Retina's 264 pixels per inch, will deliver a crisper 216 pixels per inch to the Kindle Fire's 169.
Pushing all of those pixels on the Nexus 7 will be Nvidia's quad-core Tegra 3 processor, clocking in at 1.2GHz. The dual-core, 1-GHz TI OMAP4 processor in the Kindle Fire is still going to get you through most basic tasks, like Web browsing, media playback, and most apps. But for the next generation of power-hungry games and apps, the aging chipset on the Kindle Fire won't be able to keep up with the Nexus 7.
Both tablets will connect to 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi networks, but the Nexus 7 has the added benefit of built-in Bluetooth and NFC. That means it'll work with the vast selection of Bluetooth speakers and peripherals, while NFC could be used with Google Wallet or to easily share information between devices.
