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A pair of images hitting the Internet today have the Android community in a tizzy over the possible first photos of the fabled Nexus tablet. Initially posted on PhoneArena, the two pictures give a decent, albeit blurry, look at the rumored device.
The front side of the device photographed has a white face, while the rear side looks to have two colors, black up top and silver along the bottom. Given the position and orientation of the Google logo, the tablet looks to be designed for portrait mode as opposed to Android’s more popular landscape mode. Meanwhile, the Asus logo at the bottom clearly indicates who has designed the hardware and matches up with some long-held rumors.
At first blush this looks like a pretty sharp 7-inch tablet, even if it borrows heavily from Samsung’s Galaxy S III aesthetics. And, even though it doesn’t look much like other Asus products, it’s an attractive design.
It’s important to ask, though, is this the real deal or something made up to appease the fans? TechHog believes it could be more of the latter.
PhoneArena
In this photo you’ll notice what appear to be a speaker near the top of the tablet and a proximity sensor and light sensor near the camera. Neither the speaker nor the proximity sensor have any reason for being on the device unless it was expected to be held next to an ear. Unless Google is ready to announce VoIP for Google Voice then there’s no rationale for this design. Additional inconsistencies pointed out by TechHog include a glare found in identical places on both the front and back, the blurred Google logo, and cropped shadows.
Just to tip things back in favor of legitimacy, I’ll remind readers that it’s not uncommon for companies to put together renders and mockups for internal dialogue. It stands to reason that someone within the Asus team came up with this for the sake of presentation. Are the blurred captions to the right of the images the little touches of an extremely detailed fake or something real? With less than a month to go before Google I/O 2012, I suspect we’ll find out very soon.
