This week finally saw a long-awaited dock launch for Google’s Nexus 7 tablet. The $29.99 accessory holds the Nexus 7 in landscape mode, propping it an angle that’s good for watching video or other online content. A micro-USB port and 3.5 millimeter headphone jack are the only interfaces, keeping the dock simple, but limited, to use. Also limited is actual stock of the dock.

In under 24 hours in the U.S., the product page went from “in stock” to “temporarily out of stock” to “ships soon”. Google is also selling the dock in the U.K., Australia, Canada, Germany and Japan, and readers in those countries have told me there is still available stock outside of the U.S. While its good that as of this writing, Google’s Play Store says it should have stock in less than one week, the company needs to get a better handle on its product supply to become a viable hardware retailer.

On the software side of Android, Google has no such problems. This week it added data compression support to its Chrome Beta for Android. By typing chrome://flags in the address bar in Chrome’s beta, you can find and enable the experimental compression. Doing so sends all non-secure HTTP requests through Google’s servers. Where possible, Google will further compress images to its WebP format and remove any unneeded data during the web session; this speeds up the browser experience while reducing the amount of wireless data needed.

After you enable this function the Chrome Beta for Android app, you can even see how much of a data reduction is taking place. Type chrome://net-internals in your Chrome address bar and tap the Bandwidth tag. A real-time table of the data compression savings will appear, both for your current session and for all time, starting when you turned on the experimental feature.

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Read also:

Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie: What we know so far (Know Your Mobile)

Android Is Dead (Long Live Google) (ReadWriteWeb)

What's Next For Android: Google's New Hardware Strategy (TheStreet.com)

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