Google Chrome/Android Chief Sundar Pichai Intros New Tablet (LIVE)

With its usual air of mystery, Google Google has invited a bunch of press folks to a "breakfast with Sundar Pichai" this morning in San Francisco.

Pichai, the Google senior vice president in charge of both the mobile operating software Android and the Chrome operating software for netbooks, is expected to provide some kind of update on one or both of those products. As I wrote in a previous post on the invitation:

It's a decent bet that it could involve the next generation of Android software, code-named Key Lime Pie, which failed to make an expected appearance at Google's developer conference in May. Software developers are eagerly anticipating the new version.Other bets for what might be revealed center on new hardware, such as new versions of Google's Nexus 7 tablets. Or perhaps a revamped Nexus Q media streaming device.Perhaps we'll even get a sense for how the two operating systems, which seem to overlap more with each new version, will play together in the future. Depending on whom you talk to, one of them will get subsumed into the other-even Google cofounder Sergey Brin said so almost four years ago-but Google has at least officially said they serve different purposes and will do so going forward.Apple seems to make two operating systems work just fine, so there's no overt reason to combine them, but having two of them makes software development and distribution more complicated. And Pichai himself implied some kind of integration at the Google I/O conference by showing how a game created for the desktop could be easily translated to Android. Not least, a change in the situation seemed to be in the air when Pichai himself took on the Android stewardship in addition to heading Chrome after Android chief Andy Rubin left in March for another, unspecified job at Google.

Someone in the press line suggested we might see the first Chrome-based tablet-not a bad guess. The new Nexus 7 is due out next week. Anyway, we'll find out shortly, starting at 9 a.m. Pacific. Stay tuned....