Heating up the tablet war with Apple’s dominant iPad, Amazon.com Inc's Kindle Fire and Microsoft Surface, Google on Wednesday, launched the Nexus 7, an 8GB version which will be sold for $199 (£127) from mid July.

Similar to the Kindle Fire, Google is positioning the Nexus 7 as a gateway into all the content you can purchase or rent on Google Play. It's not clear if the Nexus 7 will be a “buying machine” the way some have described Amazon's Kindle Fire's seamless access to Amazon's digital storefront. But Google would certainly like you to believe that this is what the Nexus 7 is all about.

The seven inch tablet powered by the latest generation of Android software is being made for Google by Taiwan based Asus and weighs about as much as a paperback book, according to Android team head Hugo Barra.

"We wanted to design a best of Google experience optimized around the content available at Google Play," Barra said during a presentation opening the Internet titan's annual developers conference in San Francisco.

According to BBC News, Tudor Aw, technology sector head at KPMG Europe said it marked a shift towards Apple's business model which recognised the advantage of being involved in both hardware and software.

"Following hard on the heels of a similar announcement by Microsoft last week [this] demonstrates that gaining a strong marketshare of the tablet market will be critical to tech players if they want to maintain a strong relationship with their end customers both consumers and business users," he said.