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Google's Nexus 7 Selling Out at Key Retailers

The 7-inch tablet built by Google and Asus is already out of stock at GameStop, Sam's Club, and other brick-and-mortar outlets in just the first weekend of its general release.

July 14, 2012

The is selling like hotcakes at various brick-and-mortar retail outlets in its first weekend of general release, with some retailers already reporting that the 7-inch Android tablet built by Google and Asus is out of stock.

GameStop, Sam's Club, and Staples were listing the device as out of stock as of Friday, while Office Depot appeared to still have a few Nexus 7 tablets on hand, according to a rundown of several Nexus 7 retailers compiled by Newsday. GameStop had "already run through its first two allocations of the tablet," the site reported.

A third shipment of Nexus 7 tablets should arrive in August, according to GameStop.

The Nexus 7 was on June 27 at the search giant's Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco. Customers have been able to pre-order the tablets from Google and through a handful of its retail partners over the past two weeks and the devices began shipping to consumers Friday.

The Android 4.1 Jelly Bean-based tablet has sparked a considerable amount of interest, due in part to an attractive price tag, but also because of favorable ratings from a number of notable tech reviewers, . The Nexus 7 starts at $199 for the 8GB version—putting it in direct competition with Amazon's $199 tablet—and a 16GB version is available for $249.

UPDATE: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that the 16GB Nexus 7 was priced at $299, not the correct price of $249.

The Nexus 7 isn't seen as a direct rival to Apple's best-selling iPad, a larger device at nearly 10 inches that has a higher resolution display and starts at $499. But like the Kindle Fire before it, Google's tablet is potentially shaping up to be the among the first non-Apple tablets to succeed in a market where would-be iPad-killers like Hewlett-Packard's , Motorola's , and Research in Motion's have struggled mightily to simply get off the ground.

There's a caveat to the Nexus 7 success story, however. Just as Amazon is , Google appears to be selling the Nexus 7 at or near a loss to keep the price tag down, according to that estimated the cost of making a Nexus 7 tablet to be between $152 and $167.