Huawei-made 7-inch Google tablet tipped to arrive later this year

Google is thought to be working on a 7-inch tablet, slated for a late 2016 release.

Few details about the device have emerged except for the name of its manufacturer, Huawei, and the amount of RAM memory it would have: 4GB.

The rumor comes courtesy of one reliable leaker of all things mobile, Evan Blass aka @evleaks.

Google's current phablet in the Nexus lineup, the Nexus 6P, is built by Huawei, so the idea of the Chinese smartphone maker building a tablet for Google isn't far fetched. Furthermore, it's been a long, long time since Google launched a Nexus tablet -- the Nexus 9 came out in 2014 -- and even longer since the company released a 7-inch tablet, the now-discontinued Nexus 7, which came out in 2013.

In Sept. 2015, Google did launch its 10-inch Pixel C tablet, which is much more of a productivity device and a Surface/iPad Pro competitor than your average Android tablet.

Note that Blass does not call this device a "Nexus". A report in June claimed Google planned to release a phone from scratch, under its own brand, but CEO Sundar Pichai also said the company planned to invest "a lot more effort" into Nexus and would continue to work with hardware partners.

It's worth pointing out that just days ago, at the IFA electronics trade show in Berlin, Huawei launched an 8.4-inch Android tablet called the MediaPad M3 with a 2K-resolution screen, 4GB of RAM, a fingerprint sensor and dual 8-megapixel cameras (one on the front, one on the back). The company put a lot of emphasis on the audio quality of device's Harman Kardon-branded 1W stereo speakers.

We wouldn't mind seeing any of that (or all of it) in a Google-branded tablet, but when it comes to its own devices, Google likely calls (nearly) all the shots.