Built by Asus, the Nexus 7 has much of what you'd expect from a high-end tablet: It features a beautiful, high-definition touchscreen, a zippy processor and a powerful graphics chip that makes video look stunning. It's lightweight but feels solid in the hand, and it's fairly easy to use.
Yet its low price -- $199, compared to $499 for the latest iPad -- pits the Nexus 7 squarely against the lower-end of the tablet market, particularly the Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) Kindle Fire. The Nexus 7's smallish, seven-inch screen -- plus Google's prominent placement of apps for videos, books, movies and magazines -- puts it head-to-head with the identically priced Fire.
If this were just a hardware battle, the Nexus 7 would win hands down. Its screen crams in about 28% more pixels per inch than the Kindle Fire. It has a front-facing camera (the Kindle has none), Bluetooth connectivity, a twice-as-fast processor and twice the memory. All that comes with the same battery life in a device that is two ounces lighter.
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