The Google Nexus 5: five Nexus phones for Android's fifth birthday

There's a rumour doing the rounds we thought we'd entertain, mainly because we like it when companies celebrate their coming of age in style. In this case, five Google Nexus devices are reportedly going to arrive on November 5, which will mark exactly five years since Android officially launched in 2007.

If this is the first you've heard of it, perhaps you are thinking it's a little farfetched. And it is, except there's a little more meat on this particular bone. The next version of Android, known as Jelly Bean, will be Android 5.0 as the current Ice Cream Sandwich iteration is 4.0.

Of course, somebody had to throw a spanner in the works. One of the rumoured devices has been benchmarked and it was found to have Android 4.1. This would suggest the update might be a minor one and it somewhat ruins all those fives we just listed.

Google's I/O developer event is under a month away so the wait to find out more isn't going to be long.

Those are the facts, and these are our predictions for what the five devices might be.

Nexus 7 tablet

The Nexus 7 is the device that was reportedly benchmarked, revealing Android 4.1 as the operating system.

Known internally as Grouper - Google likes to use fish names for codenames, apparently - the Nexus 7 is allegedly going to have a 1.3GHz quad core processor of the Nvidia Tegra 3 variety. The display, which will be 7-inches in size, has a 1,280x768 pixel resolution.

It will be made by Asus, which would back up rumours from earlier in the year. Apparently Motorola lost the pitch, HTC wasn't too keen on developing a budget device and Acer lacks its own research and development labs.

The idea of the Nexus 7 is to take on the Amazon Kindle Fire, so expect it to cost around £150 to £200, if it actually turns out to be a real device.

Nexus 5 'phablet'

Samsung's Galaxy Note sold rather well and recently we had the pleasure of having a go with the LG Optimus Vu. It's therefore safe to say the 5-inch 'is it a phone or tablet?' style is gaining a lot of fans.

This is why we think Google would be in a position to try and plug this gap in the market with one of its own. And with a number of manufacturers yet to make a 5-inch device as of yet, it could come from Motorola, Huawei, Acer, Asus and so on.

Of course, the other school of thought suggests Android and its five devices would all arrive as flagship smartphones from different manufacturers, effectively surrounding the iPhone, as our deputy editor suggested.

But we feel a bit of variation and playing to each manufacturer's strengths would make more sense. Either way, we're hopefully getting a lot more Android Nexus action and a 5-inch Phablet would be pretty awesome.

Imagine it: A 720p or 1080p display, 5-inch IPS panel, Android Jelly Bean and excellent audio capabilities would make it a great portable media player.

Nexus 10

While Android is hoping to cement itself at the budget end of the tablet market, nobody can deny wanting to take on Apple for the lion's share of the premium end. The iPad is basically a license to print money, much likes its smartphones.

This is where we would like to see Google fight back with a Nexus 10-inch tablet but not necessarily a high-spec beast. We've seen most attempts in this part of the market fail miserably not because of the hardware, promotion or timing, but because of price. The iPad 2 and the new iPad are the benchmark and releasing something with a higher price than that is financial suicide unless you really differentiate with, say, a keyboard like Asus has done with its Transformer range.

Likely specs? We can see Samsung maybe giving this one a go, so that would mean an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, 720p display to keep costs down, 1GB of RAM, a 5-megapixel rear camera and a 1.3 megapixel camera or thereabouts at the front for video calls.