The form saw its first measured success with the Kindle Fire, which cracked a few million unit sales in a single month during 2011’s holiday season. But the Fire’s reception then, and sales performance since, doesn’t suggest a raft of blissfully happy customers. While Amazon’s tablet has a couple of enthusiastic fans here at Ars, the guess in our review that it would “end up often as a gift from early tablet adopters to late ones” seemed to come true. You wouldn’t buy one for yourself, perhaps, but it was a good enough present for the technologically apathetic: Mom, Dad, Grandma, or Technologically Illiterate Sibling.

Enter stage right—well, more like stage from above, the God of Tablets bombing down in a skydiving suit wearing Google Glass—the Nexus 7. Google adopted the internals of Asus’s Memo 370 shown at CES in January, revamped the body, and bequeathed the device with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. All while maintaining a $199 base price point.

The specs, design, and cost all make the Nexus 7 seem like the Holy Grail of tablets. As we’ll show later, it can even keep pace with the (significantly more expensive) iPads in many respects. It’s great. Suspiciously great. Suddenly we have everything we want (well, close to it), for less money than we probably would have paid for it. Selling hardware cheap—in hopes that more money can be made elsewhere—is not a new game. But the Nexus 7 suggests Google is going to play that game harder and better than we’ve seen in a long time.

MORE:  Divine intervention: Google’s Nexus 7 is a fantastic $200 tablet | Ars Technica.

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Online Marketing Trends: The Tablet Economics Index: 45% mobile Sales from iPad.

We’ve been hearing reports of a Google Nexus Tablet for months now, however the reports are suggesting it may be coming sooner, rather than later. Android and Me claims to have solid sources within Asus that report a $149 quad-core Nexus tablet is a “done deal”, however The Verge is suggesting it might be closer to $199. Either way this is a great price for a 7-inch pure Google tablet, and will be an important step if they are going to protect the Google marketplace from the Amazon onslaught.That is of course, assuming the rumors are true.

READ MORE:

via Maximum PC | Rumor: Asus Built Google Nexus Tablet Coming Soon – Under $200.

HP cut the price of the TouchPad from $500 to $99 earlier this month, after announcing it was pulling the plug on the product. Since then, the item has been hard to find, as customers rushed to get their hands on the discounted tablet.

The new demand prompted Mark Budgell, HP’s PR Manager for Social Media Strategy, to address the issue in a blog post Monday. Budgell said he had no information about whether more TouchPads will become available. “We will have more information available in the next few days about whether or not more will be available and if so, what the details will be about the situation,” he wrote.

via HP’s TouchPad May Have a Second Life.

Verizon is now selling Intuit’s GoPayment credit card reader for free at its retail stores.

Thanks to a new partnership between Verizon Wireless and Intuit, business customers can get the mobile card reader for free after a $30 rebate and the activation of a GoPayment account. The card reader and its app can be found at all of Verizon’s retail stores and as well as its business-to-business outlets.

via Verizon offering Intuit’s GoPayment reader for free | Digital Media – CNET News.