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Motorola XYBOARD 10.1inch On Verizon

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has announced the coming of the first Android tablet from the company. According to him, Google will start “to market a tablet of the highest quality” within the next six months. This is apparently their latest move in what Schmidt called “brutal competition” between Google and archrival Apple.

It has been taken for granted that the tablet will be a Nexus Tablet and that is what it is being referred to as. Google has not put forward an official name for it. It may be another company’s tablet as well, since Google will only be ‘marketing’ it. This is what happened when Google helped Motorola launch the first Honeycomb Android tablet in the form of XOOM. However, since XOOM 2 AKA XYBOARD was just released by Motorola, the chances of it being them again is highly unlikely. But there’s a counter argument to that too.

Google is now the part owner of Motorola Mobility and it makes business sense for them to utilize these resources in order to better build a tablet. Whichever company Google chooses to go with, it is still dependent on other companies to create the device for them. Apple on the other hand has the advantage of hardcore R&D that is extremely future-forward in its nature and is based on developing closely married software and hardware with the hardware being the main focus.

One this is almost certain though — given the time frame of the tablet it is likely that it will be using the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) OS. This is the first Android OS to have merged the tablet and mobile experience and brought it to the same version. Android 3.2 Honeycomb is confined to tablets whilst Android 3.3 Gingerbread is used for mobiles.

Schmidt also said his company is going to leverage their own voice recognition in this tablet in order to better challenge Apple’s voice-based personal assistant application Siri. Schmidt praised the late Steve Jobs, the founder and visionary behind Apple, calling him “the Michelangelo of our time”. Then added that it is still capitalism and their companies will therefore remain competitors.

Meanwhile, Taiwanese technology new source Digitimes reported saying Google’s Android Tablet plans might hurt the rest of the Android 4.0 ICS devices. These devices are often part of branded efforts where individual PC vendors are helping Google launch Android 4.0 ICS tablets during the first half of 2012. Digitimes attributed the speculation to unnamed sources within the PC industry in the report.

According to the report, the local PC industry in Taiwan (a large hub of PC vendors of different stratas) is worried about the possibility of the so-called Nexus Tablet running Android 4.1 while the rest of the market running on Android 4.0 ICS. This would cause most users to defer their tablet purchase till the Nexus Tablet becomes available. Now it remains to be seen how Google handles this conundrum.