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Reuters is reporting it has received confirmation from an Asus executive that they will introduce a 7 inch tablet aimed at competing with Amazon's Kindle Fire during the Google I/O event this morning.
"Google Inc will soon unveil a tablet co-branded with Taiwan's Asustek Computer Inc and priced to compete with Amazon's Kindle Fire device, an Asustek executive said on Wednesday," Retuers is reporting.
"It's targeting Amazon. The Kindle is based on Google's platform but with its own service, so Google has to launch its own service, too," said the executive of the device to the new agency.
The Exec refrained from providing any technical details or specs of the tablet device but it is widely rumored to be powered by a Tegra 3 chip, possibly running on Google's 'Kai' reference platform, which is designed to keep costs down.
It's also not immediately clear what the executive meant by "Google has to launch its own service, too". Google of course has their Play.Google.com site which already provides books, apps, games, music and video which it could use to compete with Amazon's similar offerings. Whether Google plans to offer a souped up service that includes some premium services for a price, similar to 'Amazon Prime' is unknown.
Other 7 inch tablets the 'Nexus 7' is likely to compete with include the Nook Color and Nook Tablet by Barnes & Noble. The Google I/O Keynote starts at 9:30am Pacific/ 12:30pm Eastern today which is when the announcement of the Google/Asus Nexus 7 Tablet is expected.