Google

Google will launch a $199 tablet this week at its developers conference co-branded with Asus, Bloomberg is reporting.

This follows a series of reports that have been trickling out for months about a 7-inch Nexus tablet being developed with Asus. The tablet is slated to debut at the Google I/O conference that starts Wednesday.

The one feature garnering the most attention is price. At $199, the Google tablet is $200 less than Apple's $399 iPad 2.

Previous reports have claimed the Nexus device will sport the Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean" operating system, a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, 1GB of memory, and IPS (in-plane-switching) screen -- which boasts wide viewing angles.

The $399 iPad 2, by comparison, comes with a dual-core A5 and 512MB of RAM.

The Google tablet is expected, however, to have a 7-inch screen, considerably smaller than the iPad's 9.7-incher (which is also IPS, by the way).

Of course, apps are what matter to many, if not most, people. Though Google claims hundreds of thousands of apps, the iPad has more apps overall and more apps designed specifically for the tablet format, as reviewers are wont to point out.

Other expected Google tablet features include NFC (near field communication), Google Wallet, and Android Beam.

An 8GB model will cost $199, while the 16GB version will still be pretty cheap at $249, according to Gizmodo Australia.

It's worth noting this isn't the first highly anticipated $199 Android tablet. The $199 Amazon Kindle Fire was announced last year to great fanfare and a new Kindle Fire could arrive as early as July.