review Manufactured by ASUS, the Nexus 7 is the
first Google tablet to carry the coveted ‘Nexus’ brand which the search
giant likes to append to flagship reference models running its Android
operating system. But does the tablet do enough to overcome Android’s
troubled history in the tablet market and rival Apple’s dominant iPad?
Read on to find out.
Design
Compared with almost every other Android tablet we’ve seen (and there
are a lot out there, most of them pretty mediocre), the Nexus 7 tablet
is an exercise in minimalism, which is definitely a good thing.
On the front of the tablet are just two things — its 7″ touchscreen
and a small camera for video calling. The screen is surrounded by a
substantial black plastic border reaching to the metallic rim edges of
its casing. Given that manufacturers like Samsung and HTC have recently
made an art out of getting their touchscreens almost to the edge of
their smartphone cases, we consider the amount of wasted space on the
Nexus 7′s front a little excessive — it’s at about two centimetres above
the screen and one on either side. When you consider that the Nexus 7′s
touchscreen controls also take up space inside the screen at the
bottom, we feel the casing size is not ideal for the size of its
touchscreen.
The back of the tablet is similarly minimalist. It’s composed of
lovely soft dimpled leather material, stamped with the ‘nexus’ branding
and also a subtle ASUS monogram. On the bottom is a small speaker grill.
On the sides, before they curve away around the tablet’s back, sits a
volume rocker and power buttom (right) and a 3.5mm audio jack and
microUSB port for charging and synching with a PC. On the top, as on the
left-hand-side, there’s nothing.
If you were to pick the Nexus 7 up, there isn’t much remarkable about it. At first glance it could be
the Kindle Fire, or
the BlackBerry PlayBook
— similar 7″ tablets. But it’s precisely this understated minimalism
which becomes attractive after a few seconds. Very quickly you realise
that this is a tablet which just feels lovely in the hands. Unlike most
Android tablets and the iPad, it has a lovely leathery back, which is
grippy and curvy and nice to touch. It has just the right weight — at
340 grams. It has just the right size, being easy to pick up and hold in
one hand, unlike the iPad. It’ll even fit width-wise in the back
pockets of many people’s jeans.
On the whole, the Nexus 7 feels like the best-designed tablet we’ve
ever held. It’s just that nice. And we’re sure you’ll love fondling it
too, if you pick one up. Perhaps the only negative we could say about it
is the fact that the 3.5mm headphone jack is positioned on the tablet’s
bottom, which isn’t the most comfortable spot for it.
Features
The Nexus 7 improves on the specifications of the Kindle Fire and other
7″ Android tablets in a number of ways. Probably its hero features are
its quad-core Tegra 3 processor, which will make it more than powerful
enough to handle any multimedia content or games you can throw at it, as
well as the fact that it’s the first tablet to run the next version of
Google’s Android platform (Jelly Bean).
Jelly Bean gives the Android universe a number of improvements over
the previous version (ice Cream Sandwich). For starters, Google’s
‘Project Butter’ is slated to make Jelly Bean’s user interface silky
smooth and fluid, improving the frame rate of animations and making the
interface feel a lot nicer than it does now — we still get the odd jaggy
on Ice Cream Sandwich.
There’s a new personal assistant/information prediction feature
called Google Now, and voice search has also been improved in Jelly
Bean, as well as the ability to enter text into the device by talking.
Widget management, notifications, app encryption and more are other
features which will arrive with the new O/S.
Apart from these hero features, most of the Nexus 7′s features are
pretty much what you would expect. The tablet has a 7″ 1280×800 back-lit
IPS HD display (216 ppi), which is a higher resolution than the Kindle
Fire’s 1024×600 resolution. This display sits under a pane of Corning’s
Gorilla Glass, and there’s a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera for video
calls. The device comes in 8GB or 16GB models, costing AU$249 or AU$299
respectively online, and a 4325mAh battery for up to eight hours of
active use is included. Other features include support for 802.11b/g/n
Wi-Fi, but no 3G or 4G mobile broadband, as well as a micro USB
connection for charging and syncing; a NFC chip for mobile transactions
or beaming data to other Android devices, a microphone, accelerometer
and so on.
Performance
There are two aspects of the Nexus 7′s performance which you need to
know about. And the good news is that the tablet performs fantastically
with respect to each one.
The first one is the new version of Android, Jelly Bean. To say that
this is a landmark version of Android is no understatement. To our mind,
this is the first version of Android which truly matches the slickness
and maturity of Apple’s iOS platform. With Jelly Bean, Android has truly
arrived, and it’s a wonder to behold. While there are quite a few new
features in Jelly Bean, including the new personal assistant/information
prediction option Google Now, and things like widget management and
notifications have also been improved, the real standout feature here
which you’ll notice is the implementation of Project Butter.
Using the Nexus 7, with its powerful Tegra 3 CPU and Project Butter,
is a revelation. Apps load instantly, with a lovely smooth animation.
Screens flip around just as smoothly. Navigation is slick as all hell
and sexy enough to make us want to just dance our fingers around the
touchscreen to see it move. From lock screen animations to notifications
to application/window management … it’s just all so smooth and lovely
to use.
Apps also get a performance boost on the Nexus 7. From HD video
through YouTube to download eBooks, to updating apps through the Google
Play Store to browsing the web on rich media sites … whatever you want
to do, the Nexus 7 has the sheer power to do it, and it’s all done
smoothly. Smooth as butter.
It’s fairly hard to quantify the impact Project Butter has had,
but think of the way that Windows 7′s window movements got really nice,
translucent and smooth, compared with Windows XP. Or the difference
between new versions of Mac OS X compared with those of five years ago,
and you’ll get the idea. With Jelly Bean, Google has far exceeded the
user interface of iOS, and we find it hard to go back to iOS’s harshly
mechanical interface after using Jelly Bean. Butter might be fattening —
but as far as we’re concerned, we’ll take as much as we can get.
The second aspect of the Nexus 7 which you’ll want to know about is
battery life. On paper Google rates the tablet’s 4325mAh battery as
being able to deliver nine hours of HD video playback, ten hours of web
browsing, ten hours of e-reading and 300 hours of standby. We’re not 100
percent convinced by the standby statistic (with moderate use, our
Nexus 7 gave up the ghost independently after five days of moderate
use), but we still have to say that the battery life on the Nexus 7 is
still very solid.
Like the iPad, this is a tablet which you’ll probably only be
charging once a week or so, if that. If you use it intensively for a
couple of hours a day, it will be more, but the nature of the Nexus 7
appears to be that it’s the sort of tablet you pick up and use for a
bit, then put down, and expect it to still have battery life when you
pick it up a day or so later. That’s how we use our iPad, and it felt
like the Nexus 7 would perform similarly in terms of its battery life.
Coupled with its stellar design and build quality, as well as its
one-hander 7″ form factor (something the iPad lacks) these two aspects —
performance and battery life — are what really sold us on the Nexus 7.
This is just the perfect device to keep in your bag or on your desk and
pick up whenever you get a whim to read an eBook, watch a movie on a
plane (we watched ‘The Hunger Games’ from the Google Play Store in bed),
do some social networking or email and so on. It’s smaller and easier
to handle than an iPad, and overall these factors sold it.
There are some other aspects to the Nexus 7 which you might want to
know about — but not everyone will care. We’ll go through some of them
now in brief.
With Jelly Bean comes a new voice-activated search feature in
Android, and in our testing on the Nexus 7, it works really well — well
enough that it comes close to recognising search terms like “Renai
LeMay”, which, let’s face it, is a challenge for any voice recognition
system. In our testing, the Jelly Bean voice search was much more useful
than Apple’s similar Siri system, although not as integrated with the
wider operating system. In most cases, you can just hit a button and
tell the Nexus 7 what you’re searching the web for, and it will find it.
We didn’t really get into testing the ‘Google Now’ feature that
deeply, as most of the information sources it uses to predict what
you’re looking for don’t really work yet in Australia (this isn’t really
a surprise). Some Delimiter readers have reported some degree of
success with it, but Nexus 7 owners and reviewers seem a bit divided in
whether it will be a useful tool, and how long it will take to be really
useful in Australia. There’s quite a bit of agreement out there that
predicting user behaviour on devices like tablets is definitely the way
things will go in future, but is it there yet? Not from what we can see
of Google Now. Most Australians will probably interpret this feature as
basically being a quirky new feature linked to the improved voice search
function, and that’s more or less how we view it for the moment as
well.
There are some downsides to the Nexus 7. For starters, this is a
tablet designed to be used online — it wouldn’t even let us set it up
without connecting to a Wi-Fi network. And of course there are the usual
compulsory links to all of Google’s services, including your Google
account, which we find tends to funnel too much information Google’s way
by default. However, unlike the iPad, the Google Nexus 7 doesn’t come
with any 3G/4G mobile broadband access. The pain here is lessened due to
modern smartphone tethering, but we would still like to see terrestrial
cellular access here.
If you’re using from a HTC or Samsung Android phone, you will suffer
some discombobulation as you try to work out where all the right
settings and apps are stored, given the subtle user interface
differences these manufacturers’ software overlays on Android. We found
this aspect of the Nexus 7 quite frustrating — hunting around in Jelly
Bean’s much more limited settings menu was a pain, compared to our HTC
One XL.
And there is just some plain weirdness out there … Jelly Bean, like
many Android releases, has occasional problems with PDF attachments in
email, and when we tried to examine The Hunger Games video we had
purchased on Google’s Play Store a few days earlier (it had since
expired), we weren’t able to re-purchase the film or even preview it …
we just got errors no matter what we did.
But overall the Nexus 7 performed really, well in virtually all aspects.
Any quibbles we had about the tablet’s performance were just that —
quibbles, not major issues.
Conclusion
A few days after we received our Google Nexus 7 tablet as a review unit
from ASUS, we realised something. We had started thinking of the unit as
our new primary tablet device and had set up all kinds of systems on it
that we wouldn’t usually bother doing on review units. The thought of
sending the unit back (it will return to ASUS tomorrow) filled us with
fear and panic. What would we do without it? Then we realised we could
just order a new one online or buy one from the range of Australian
retailers selling them in Australia — at a pretty decent price, too.
Then our thoughts turned to gadget lust and how much we looked forward
to buying a new Nexus 7.
This should tell you something. The Nexus 7 is not just a good
Android tablet or a worthy alternative to the iPad. We’ve had those
before. It’s the first Android tablet which people — a lot of people —
are going to really want to actually buy, which hasn’t happened before
with Android tablets (apart from the Kindle Fire, which never launched
in Australia). If our personal experience is emblematic of the
mainstream, this thing is going to sell like hotcakes in Australia — and
in fact,
there is evidence that this is already happening.
We repeat: We didn’t just like the Nexus 7. We actively want one.
Right now. As quickly as possible. And we can see ourselves using it a
lot more than our iPad, which has now been relegated to second place in
our household tablet pantheon.
The Nexus 7 does pretty much everything the Apple iPad does, but it
comes in a form factor much more suitable for single-handed use, and it
has a better user interface and comparable battery life. Plus, it’s much
cheaper. This is an awesome tablet, and we’re happy to issue an
unqualified ‘buy now’ rating on it. Pick one up. You won’t regret it.
Shin Jong-kyun, the head of Samsung's mobile phone division,
presents the Galaxy Camera at its "Mobile Unpacked" event in Berlin on
Wednesday. /AP-Newsis
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