The Nexus 7 is selling like hotcakes at various US brick-and-mortar retail outlets just a few days into its general release, with some retailers already reporting that the 7in Android tablet built by Google and Asus is out of stock.
GameStop, Sam's Club, and Staples were listing the device as out of stock as of 13 July, while Office Depot appeared to still have a few Nexus 7 tablets on hand, according to a rundown of several Nexus 7 retailers compiled by Newsday.
GameStop had "already run through its first two allocations of the tablet," the site reported. A third shipment of Nexus 7 tablets should arrive in August, according to GameStop.
The
Nexus 7 was unveiled by Google on 27 June at the search giant's Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco. Customers have been able to pre-order the tablets from Google and through a handful of its retail partners over the past two weeks and the devices began shipping to consumers Friday.
The Android 4.1 Jelly Bean-based tablet has sparked a considerable amount of interest, due in part to an attractive price tag, but also because of favourable ratings from a number of notable tech reviewers.
Find one from us here. The Nexus 7 starts at £159 for the 8GB version—putting it in direct competition with Amazon's $199 (£127) Kindle Fire tablet—and a 16GB version is available for £199.
The Nexus 7 isn't seen as a direct rival to Apple's best-selling iPad, a larger device at nearly 10 inches that has a higher resolution display and starts at £399. But like the Kindle Fire before it, Google's tablet is potentially shaping up to be the among the first non-Apple tablets to succeed in a market where would-be iPad-killers like
Hewlett-Packard's discontinued TouchPad, Motorola's Xoom, and
Research In Motion's BlackBerry PlayBook have struggled mightily to simply get off the ground.
There's a caveat to the Nexus 7 success story, however. Just as Amazon is reportedly doing with its Kindle Fire (which still isn't available in the UK), Google appears to be selling the Nexus 7 at or near a loss to keep the price tag down, according to
a recent IHS iSuppli teardown that estimated the cost of making a Nexus 7 tablet to be between $152 - $167 (£98 - £108).
The device is expected to land in the UK on 19 July.