iSuppli have reported on their teardown of the Nexus 7 - $152 BOM, if you hadn't seen it already.

Interesting to see how the Kindle Fire BOM has dropped from $191 to $139.80, in the 10 months since it launched. I'm not from a hardware background, but do manufacturers generally launch with the intention of making low margin on early adopters and compensating for that with mass market take-up once prices are lower? If so, given the buzz around decent low-cost tablets, one could consider this low initial margin to be advertising.

How long does a device like this continue to sell for - a year or more? If the Nexus 7 takes the same path, then even sales of the low-end version should be generating a reasonable profit in 6 months time, or leave room to drop the price further if Apple come in low with a rumoured/FUDding (delete as appropriate) smaller iPad.

I also wonder what the "additional costs" iSuppli talk about would include - shipping, packaging (or would the latter be "box contents")?

Helen's hosting the latest Carnival of the Mobilists. I was please to note that it obviously costs more than $50 of Amazon vouchers to buy a good write-up from Terence Eden ;)

If anyone's interested and around Sussex University campus next Friday, I'll be taking part on the Postgraduate Poster Presentations in two capacities: I'm still technically on the Informatics Industry Liaison Board, and I'll be participating as a student this year. Hopefully this will involve a double helping of sandwiches.

First impressions of the Nexus 7 tablet (I took mine out today to see if it could substitute for iPad, in a full day of conference attending and note taking):

• Battery life is great. 34% left after the day.
• Form factor is great. Fits in a coat pocket, no need to carry a bag. Makes a surprising difference.
• All my usual apps (Evernote, Kindle, etc) work beautifully. Android's definitely catching up/caught up here.
• No 3G, boo. Means I will either have to tether, get used to caching stuff for offline use (Instapaper etc), or carry iPad around when I'm back in the UK: I use connectivity a lot, normally.
• The keyboard in landscape is a bit annoying: the space bar gets very very close to the "home" button, meaning I've often been inadvertently leaving an app whilst typing. Really annoying, I'm hoping I get used to it enough to avoid doing this.

I'm at Google IO this week. Lots of announcements today; some very interesting ones around software (Google Now in particular looks amazing and terrifying, I may write about that later). Some good stuff on hardware too, which got me thinking...

The Nexus range of handsets were a demonstration to the industry of what Google thought a phone ought to be. With such a low price point, the Nexus 7 tablet feels like a different beast: if it sells in any sort of numbers (and such a low price point must signal such an intention), it'll compete very effectively with tablet efforts from other manufacturers. It feels to me like Google has watched them fail to come up with any effective competition to the iPad and seen a threat from Amazon in the form of the Kindle Fire: repurposing Android and cutting out ad revenue. Google has, perhaps reluctantly, decided it'll have to deliver the goods itself - even if doing so makes it harder for Android licensees in the process. Better this than be locked out of tablets by Amazon at the low end and Apple at the high.

The Nexus brand is being extended in a new direction: last years Project Tungsten is now Nexus Q, a high priced home entertainment device. The Nexus Q was referred to fleetingly as hackable, but I got the sense this was more to please a crowd to whom it might otherwise mean little, and to contrast it with the closed devices of Apple, than to stimulate an ecosystem of add-ons... for the moment.

For me, the keynote felt like a drawing together of strings (tablet, home entertainment, and smartphone all tightly integrated) with a view to building a strong content business: that $25 Play Store voucher shipping with the Nexus 7 is designed to get a few Wallet accounts set up; Nexus Q is an incentive to move music to the Google ecosystem; and the Nexus 7 was presented as a content consumption device for magazines, film and TV. Is the aim to take the worlds best-distributed mobile platform and turn it into an engine for generating content revenues?