Smart phones and tablets are the hot thing right now, technologically speaking. So I thought I’d write about one of the new tablets on the market, the Google Nexus 7. This is the first Nexus-branded tablet, so that means Google was closely involved in its development to ensure the best Android experience. It’s the first device to come stock with Android 4.1, also known as Jelly Bean, which has a bunch of new software features. It’s not the first tablet with NFC but it’s the first tablet anyone’s ever heard of with the feature.
The hardware is great; it weighs 12 ounces and the back panel’s material feels both leathery and rubbery. The buttons are in reasonable places. It uses a standard microUSB port for charging and syncing. Here’s a weird one; they left out a rear camera. There’s a front-facing camera for video chatting, though. And the screen is very good. It’s not too pixel-dense, but it is a great screen. It’s comfortable to read books on.
The iOS, Jelly Bean, is a lot like Ice Cream Sandwich (version 4.0). The major changes are: Project Butter, Google Now, and Google Play. Project Butter is an initiative to fix one of Android’s biggest problems: it doesn’t track your finger very well. There has consistently been a lag and a slightly unnatural flow to the touchscreen interface that made it feel clunky and slow. Tracking on Jelly Bean is much improved. Google Now is a dashboard-like app that isn’t really like anything else on any other platform. You tap the search bar or hold the home button to get there. It’s like a very fancy search app; you can search with voice or text, but below that are several little “cards” that constantly and naturally update to show you things you want to know, like weather, traffic, public transit schedules, sports scores, and more. Tap the search bar, and it shows you when your nearest subway train is leaving, or what the weather is where you are right then. It will be on all Jelly Bean phones as well.
There are at most a handful of apps designed for Android tablets. When you use an Android tablet, you’re using the same apps as on your Android phone, just…bigger. Apps designed for phones work, but not well; there’s too much empty space, they look awkward, they don’t take advantage of the larger screen size. And there are definitely no apps that suggest the 7-inch form factor can do things a 10-inch tablet can’t. The Nexus can display a Twitter feed, a little bit bigger than your phone can. The new Chrome browser seems like a great browser, but with the top bar of tabs, the navigation bar, and the on-screen control buttons, you get about three inches of vertical space when you hold it in landscape mode. In vertical mode you have to do tons of horizontal scrolling—not a great option, either.
Google Play is the new name for the Android Market, which now has magazines, music, movies, and TV shows in addition to apps. The app selection, as mentioned, is lousy and Google is missing several key partners in media so the TV, movie, and music selection has giant holes. The magazines in Google Play are mostly flat PDFs.
The Nexus 7 runs around $200 for 8GB, $250 for 16GB, both with Wi-Fi only. Neither have expandable memory. The memory is kind of low, but the tablet is also extremely cheap.
The Nexus 7 is the best of its breed. But aside from reading books, it’s pretty clear that a 7-inch tablet is not preferable to a larger one. Google could even things up a little bit by really doubling down on apps. This thing needs apps! I don’t mean to be too harsh on it, it is a good gadget. It does a lot of things, it’s sturdy and well-designed, it’s fast and cheap and easy to use. But it is limited in what it can do. So, if you want a good tablet to read books on the Nexus 7 is a good choice, if you want to play games and use apps then I’d wait a while until they start developing more apps for it.
BuzzBash 