Solid Start for Google Inc’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Nexus tablet

Solid Start for Google Inc’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Nexus tablet

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) “Nexus 7″ tablet is showing an promising start, with major retailers falling short of the gadgets as the company’s first entry in an increasingly jam-packed market showed up in U.S. stores on Friday.

GameStop said that it had already fallen short of its first two allocations of the tablet, which is co-developed by Google and Taiwan’s Asustek that starts at $199 and has drawn shining reviews from some of the major gadget reviewers. A third allotment of preorders will be available in August But declined to share exact number of preorders.

Additionally, Sam’s Club, the warehouse chain owned by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and Staples showed the tablet as being out of stock on their websites as of Friday. However, Office Depot’s website continued to offer the device for sale as of the afternoon.

Google unveiled the 7-inch tablet, which it hopes will compete better against Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc. and pipe in more people into its trove of online content, at its annual developer conference in San Francisco at the end of June. Apple continues to dominate the market for touch-screen tablet computers with its two-year old iPad.

Consumers had been able to pre-order the tablet from Google and several retailers in the last few weeks but Google said it began shipping devices to consumers from Friday onwards.

The Nexus 7 uses Google’s Android mobile software, which has become the most prevalent operating system for smartphones worldwide, but has not been able to make a big splash in the tablet market up till now.

Google executives said that the company will not generate a profit margin when the Nexus 7 is sold in retail stores. However, a report by research firm IHS iSuppli estimated that the bill of materials for the $199 version of the tablet, which features 8GB of flash memory and a high-end Tegra 3 processor by Nvidia Corp, is $152.

The Nexus 7 has drawn praises from reviewers like the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg. Pundits estimate that the $199 Nexus 7 may seriously threaten the same-priced Kindle Fire, especially since Google’s offering has a camera and a higher-resolution screen.