Google is betting big with its new Nexus 7 tablet and the company is hoping to make a giant splash in the increasingly competitive market where Apple and Amazon currently hold the top spots.

The search giant unveiled the new Nexus 7 tablet, which is available on the Google Play store for $200, during the first day of its developer conference in San Francisco yesterday. The company also announced that is now activating one million Android devices daily, showing that the platform continues to grow.

?Google said multiple times yesterday that this device is optimized for Google Play ? that is significant,? said James McQuivey, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, Cambridge, MA. ?Google is selling a device that says it understands this device is only as good as the content experience it permits and that it has gone the extra mile to make sure that maps, games and other content is optimized for this device.

?It is really about the allure about having that kind of integrated content experience, which is a harder sell,? he said. ?It is a more important one in the long run and a bet that Google had to make.?

?Here and there are little bits that show this is a better device with a better experience and new content integration but these are modest improvements in how you experience YouTube, games and other content. They don?t necessarily say ?I don?t need a Kindle Fire? and they are certainly not enough to say ?I don?t need an iPad.??

Content consumption
The new tablet is being made by Asus and became available for $199 on Google Play yesterday. Here is a link to the Nexus 7 tablet on Google Play.

The 7-inch tablet will be the first device to run Android 4.1 and will come with 8GB of storage. It will start shipping in mid-July.

With the tablet, users can easily access Google Play content, including more than 600,000 apps and games, eBooks, songs, movies, TV shows and magazines.

For a limited time, Google is offering consumers who purchase a Nexus 7 $25 of credit to spend in the Google Play store, as well as free content such as Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Nexus 7 also comes with Google apps such as Gmail, Chrome, Google+ and YouTube. The apps stay in sync automatically across a user?s tablet, phone and PC.

?One hundred and ninety nine dollars is not a lot of money,? Mr. McQuivey said. ?Google could sell a whole bunch of these but anyone who might buy is someone who already has a smartphone and maybe another tablet.

?The only reason you are going to buy a Nexus 7 is not because you are a novice but because you say, I want the Google Play experience,? he said.

Mobile search updates
Additionally, Google unveiled the latest update for Android, known as Jelly Bean, which features a new mobile search experience.

The new Android operating system update includes Google Now, which will leverage a user?s search and navigation history to provide information that users need, such as suggesting alternate commuting routes if there is a lot of traffic or tells you when the next train will arrive when a user is on a train station platform. It also shows nearby restaurants when someone is walking down the street.

Google Now tries to anticipate what a person needs to know at a specific moment and location. It uses information from a user?s calendar, location and search history to automatically offer up what it thinks is information that the person needs to know.

Google also showed a voice program similar to Apple?s Siri that provides images as well as voice responses to questions.

With Microsoft having introduced its own tablet last week and Android-based tablets such as the Kindle Fire already making a dent in the market, it is not immediately clear how the Nexus 7 is different other than the integration with Google content.

However, the fact that Google has chosen to sell the device itself is also significant and reflects that the company is trying for a more integrated approach overall.

?It is probably more significant that Google is selling this itself rather than the specs either way,? said Noah Elkin, principal analyst at eMarketer, New York.

?The integrated model seems to have found favor in the market,? he said. ?With the Google Play store, Google finally integrated all of its content and media assets and by selling their own hardware, they have integrated that layer as well.?

Final Take
Hugo Barra, director of product management for Android at Google, Mountain View, CA, talks about the new Nexus 7 tablet