According to the Taiwanese supply chain and rumor website DigiTimes, ASUS plans on shipping between 7 million and 8 million Nexus 7 successors this year. The first million units are expected to go out in May, so they can arrive on store shelves in June, and then the rest are expected to trickle out during the rest of 2013.
What can you expect from this year’s Nexus 7? Reuters, who doesn’t normally publish a rumor until they know it’s pretty much a fact, says it’ll have a “higher screen resolution, a thinner bezel design and adopt Qualcomm’s chip in place of Nvidia Corp’s Tegra 3”. The rest of the internet seems to agree that means it’ll have a Snapdragon 600 and a 1080p screen.
When will Google actually announce the next Nexus 7? On May 15th, the first day of Google I/O.
Back to the shipment numbers, how does 8 million compare to the best selling tablet currently available? During the last three months of 2012, Apple managed to ship a hair under 23 million iPads. In other words, ASUS wants to do a third of that in just over double the amount of time.