Google Nexus 7 is official, shows off Android 4.1 Jelly Bean

Google's 7-inch Nexus 7 tablet is the first device to show off Jelly Bean, the latest version of Android. It costs $200 in the US and is on sale today, to be delivered in mid-July.

The Nexus 7 has a 7-inch 1,280x800 high-definition display. Under the bonnet is a Tegra 3 quad-core processor, as well as a 12-core graphics processor.

There's a front-facing 1.2-megapixel camera for video calls, but as expected no main camera. Instead of creating your own photos and videos, the Nexus 7 is designed to be ideal for videos, ebooks and magazines from Google Play. Movies and TV shows have different licensing deals in different countries, so we're not going to get to excited about that just yet.

On the app front, Chrome is the built-in browser and there's a new YouTube app optimised for tablets. Google Maps has also been souped up.

You can get personalised recommendations from built-in widgets on the home screen. Another widget identifies a song playing wherever you are and takes you straight to Google Play to buy the song.

Google promises up to 9 hours of video playback, and a whopping 300 hours on standby. It's available to pre-order in the US, UK and other countries today, although at the time of writing it hadn't popped up in Google Play so we can't confirm the UK price just yet.

The Google Nexus 7 was unveiled at the Big G's annual developer conference Google I/O in San Francisco today alongside Jelly Bean. The 7-inch tablet is a direct rival to the similarly sized Amazon Kindle Fire and Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7 -inch rather than the market-conquering iPad. With the Kindle Fire yet to cross the pond to Europe, the Nexus 7 has a great opportunity to become the boss of small, cheap tablets.

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Update: The Nexus 7 is available to pre-order now in the UK, priced at £159 for the 8GB model and £199 for the 16GB version. It'll be delivered in mid-July.