Nexus 7 sales near 1M in October, but the iPad Mini may ruin Google’s November

It looks like Google’s Nexus 7 efforts are going well so far.

Close to one million Nexus 7 tablets were sold in October, Asus Chief Financial Officer David Chang told The Wall Street Journal. Sales numbers in previous months ranged from 500 t0 700 thousand, he said.

Chang’s numbers jibe with those of Forrester Research, which estimated earlier this month that total Nexus 7 sales were closing in on 3 million. (Other analysts said that Google sold roughly one million tablets between July and September.)

While those numbers are impressive for Google, they’re tiny compared to those of Apple, which sold 14 million iPads in the third quarter.

That sales success is something Apple aims to emulate with the iPad mini, a device that’s going to make things a lot more complicated for the Nexus 7. Can Google and Asus maintain the Nexus 7’s sales numbers with Apple stepping directly on their toes? Probably not. It’s very possible that the Nexus 7’s November is going to be a lot less impressive than its October.

The iPad mini, however, is a newcomer in a market that more established competitors already dominate, which puts Apple at a natural — but not insurmountable — disadvantage.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat