Google Tablet coming soon as iPad competitor

The tablet wars are about to heat up. The iPad is currently the only meaningful tablet device around, but that may change as soon as November when Google is rumored to release their Chrome OS Tablet. According to MacRumors, the Google Tablet may be released as soon as November 26 in order to fit into the holiday shopping season.

Running Google’s Chrome OS and attached to data plans through Verizon, the hardware specs of the Google Tablet are anticipated to be impressive so that the device doesn’t “disappoint its early adopters”:

It’ll likely be based on NVidia’s Tegra 2 platform and sport a 1280×720 multitouch display, 2GB of RAM, minimum 32GB SSD, WiFi/Bluetooth/3G connectivity, GPS, webcam, and possibly expandable storage via a multi-card reader. Expect it to be every bit as geek-tastic as the Nexus One

Google will likely aggressively price the Chrome Tablet against the iPad, although the pricing structures for the device and accompanying data services are currently unknown. Data plan contracts are expected to subsidize the consumers cost of the tablet dramatically, similar to the manner of cell phone contracts.

Apple’s iPad is the dominant tablet computer at the moment, and thus far all other attempts at competing in the marketplace have flopped. Microsoft has already floundered, leaving Google to be the only foreseeable threat to the iPads dominance. Google hopes to replicate Androids success against the iPhone with their entry into the tablet market, creating yet another head-to-head battle between Apple and Google.

Not much is known about the touch interface of Chrome OS, or the appearance of the Google Tablet itself, the above image is nothing but a speculative mockup. You can run Chrome OS in Mac OS X, but the current version floating around really isn’t that exciting, it’s basically the Chrome browser running in a virtual machine. It’s highly unlikely the released version of the tablets Chrome OS will be as boring.