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OK, it is not confirmed, nor is it likely to get official confirmation, but the Nexus 7, Google’s ground-breaking tablet released earlier this year to great fanfare — declared by some as an ‘iPad Killer’ and reportedly ‘sold out’ on pre-order and after release — hasn’t even managed 1 MILLION in sales over the first quarter. This is based on analysts looking at the Google earnings report.
And since the average life-span of ANY Android device is less than 6 months, we can now declare the Nexus 7 yet ANOTHER tepid Android tablet.
I bought and have reviewed the Nexus 7, and I still have it. Why? Because it is a solid piece of hardware, runs the latest and greatest Android OS version, it is portable enough to allow me to carry around some Android games and music … and it was cheap.
The Nexus 7 is regarded as one of the best and most successful (non-Amazon) Android tablets yet, which led many to assume that perhaps as many as several million had been sold. The analyst estimates peg sales between 700,000 and 1 million. We don’t know how the retail sales are accounted for, but even the most generous assumptions don’t put the total of ALL sales beyond 3 million.
3 million sounds like quite a bit, even in the shadow of the iPad’s 17 million last quarter. But consider that Samsung was estimated to have sold 2.3 million during the same period without anything particularly new or exciting (setting aside that we know that number is overestimated by more than an order of magnitude) – and considering that the launch of the Nexus pretty much throttled sales of EVERY other Android tablet (including Nook and Kindle) for a couple of months due to price/performance advantage.
As a result, we have a Nexus tablet that at once destroyed all other Android tablets and STILL underperformed compared to the iPad. And since release the Kindle Fire HD and new Nook tablets have arrived and eclipsed the Nexus, whose sales will only plummet further from here. While I won’t directly call it a failure since we don’t have hard numbers … it certainly is NOT a success.
