Nexus 7: Is the New Kindle Fire Competitor Really a Retooled Asus Tablet?

By Dennis Kuba
July 2, 2012

While Google and Asus supposedly created the new Nexus 7 tablet in four months, the device may simply be a version of an existing product minus some features to bring down the price.
At CES, Asus was showing its Eee Pad MeMO ME370T, a 7-inch tablet that looked like the Nexus 7 but also included a rear-facing 5-megapixel camera, a microSD slot, and a micro HDMI port. While it had a Qualcomm chip at the time, Asus announced they would replace it with an Nvidia Tegra 3, but the device would cost $250.
After CES, Nvidia announced a family of low-cost Tegra 3 tablets designed to sell at $199. Removing some of the ME370T’s features and reducing the memory may simply have been a way to get the price point down to the $199 target.
“While the base design and setup was completed in the 370T to meet a certain price point and option list, the efforts required to get that design to $199 meant going back to the drawing board and starting over on just about every aspect of the unit,” an Asus rep told The Verge.
“But if Asus, Nvidia, and Google hadn’t made it a priority to challenge Amazon’s Kindle Fire, the ME370T could have been just another outdated Android tablet on the pile,” concludes the post.

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