Google hasn’t revamped its tablet lineup in a major way since last year. Only the Nexus 7 tablet was refreshed and despite countless rumors there’s no official announcement of either a new Nexus 10 or a Nexus 8. Though it appears that the company might internally be testing a new tablet after all, one that’s codenamed “flounder.” This isn’t surprising as Google has used fish names as codenames for its own devices before.
For example the Nexus 10 had mantaray as a codename, Nexus 4 was known as mako and Nexus 5 as hammerhead. Flounder hasn’t been associated with a tablet or smartphone in the past so if its popping up now it may very well point to a new device. Since Nexus 5 is already out and no new smartphone is expected, its possible that this codename really might point towards a new tablet.
The codename has appeared in the bug tracker for Google’s Chromium program. It pops up at an interesting time since Google I/O 2014 is just around the corner and the company has used this event in the past multiple times to unveil new hardware. If its working on something new that’s bound to hit the market, it would be a good bet to assume that I/O would be the place where its unveiled.
Recent reports suggest that the next Nexus tablet might have an 8-inch display and a 64-bit Intel processor. It was also rumored that HTC might be one that gets to develop the tablet this time around. Obviously there’s no official confirmation of any of this, so we’ll just have to wait until I/O 2014 to find out if a new tablet really is coming our way.