Next Nexus 7 might fail to hit $200 price point

With a mysterious Google event just a week away, we’re understandably anxious to learn if the company might be ready to introduce the long-rumored follow-up to last summer’s Nexus 7 tablet. The very affordable Android ended up being a big hit, and we’ve been wondering if Google would be able to recapture some of that lightning in a bottle for the sequel. Rumors have been looking to some significant hardware upgrades, but those might all come at a price: the latest leak suggests that the new Nexus 7 won’t be able to meet the original’s low $200 price tag.

A leak outs what it calls the Nexus 2 7″ in both 16GB and 32GB capacities, with list prices of about $230 and $270, a $20 or $30 premium over current-gen Nexus 7s of the same capacities.

With rumored specs like a 1080p display and Snapdragon 600, those prices seem like a steal, but there was always something so magical about the $200 mark. Still, we can’t imagine an extra $30 will have a huge impact on sales.

However, the nature of this leak – apparently stemming from a retailer’s inventory system – gives us pause. It wouldn’t be unlike a retailer to put placeholder data in its system before accurate numbers were available, and there’s no way for us to know if that’s the case here. As such, we wouldn’t necessarily bet on these figures, but they’re still well within the realm of believability.