Nexus 7 (Jelly Bean 4.3) 2012
NoahDesign 8
The Nexus 7 is not particularly thin for a 7” tablet, nor is it extraordinarily light, making for a dull first impression. However, on closer inspection it is unique in a few areas. Firstly, the back is made of a soft touch plastic that is definitely one of my favorite materials for tablet backs I’ve ever felt. It is very grippy, and feels really good in my hands. Around the entire side of the tablet is a silver colored strip of plastic. I think this adds a nice accent to the otherwise entirely black design. The bezel seems unnecessarily thick at almost 0.4” on the sides and 0.8” on the top and bottom. I think this space would have been better used to make a bigger screen or a smaller tablet. Although the Nexus seems well made, there is one area that is bothersome; if you hold the tablet in landscape mode and wiggle it back and forth, you can hear a creaking sound. This doesn’t give the impression of a sturdy tablet. The buttons are well placed. They’re easy to reach whether you’re holding the Nexus in portrait or landscape mode. Just be aware that this tablet is impossible to use efficiently with one hand. Display 7 Despite the low resolution of 1280x800, the Nexus 7 display is acceptable. This is largely because of the small 7” size, which results in a reasonable 216 ppi. Pixels are hardly distinguishable, and colors are excellent, whether viewing pictures, playing a game or watching a movie. I found viewing angles to be great, colors stay true evening when at extreme positions. One thing I really love on tablet displays is a sensation that you’re actually touching the things you’re seeing, and not a featureless piece of glass. The Nexus 7 does this really well. Text doesn’t look particularly sharp, but jagged edges won’t be noticeable unless you view it with a critic’s eye. The screens maximum brightness definitely could be brighter, as the screen was extremely hard to see with any glare. Also, there is virtually no change in 75% to 100% brightness. Battery Life 6 Battery life is undeniably not a strong point for the Nexus 7. You’ll need to charge it every night, and if you’re a medium-heavy user you’ll probably be looking for a plug midway through the day. A few hours of web surfing, social and email and you’ll be ok, but throw in gaming and a movie and you could fully drain the battery twice in one day. After 30 minutes of playing “The Dark Knight Rises” game, the battery had drained 15 percent, while watching a movie for the same length of time drained about 8 percent. Don’t rely on Nexus 7 to get you through the whole day, especially if you plan on some gaming and a movie. User Interface 8 When you turn the device on you are greeted by a lock with a circle around it, and a card showing the time. You swipe from the middle of the circle to the edge and the device swiftly unlocks. The animations for this action are very elegant and smooth. More cards can be added, such as music, email, calendar and Google+ posts. The Apps drawer also has some cool animations as you swipe between screens, although the occasional lag while doing so can no doubt be attributed to these. Fashion over function is never a tradeoff that should be made with tablets. Overall the interface feels “buttery”. Google’s Project Butter, a software project to make the Android interface run more fluidly, has really paid off. Notifications are another really strong point for Android; in the top left corner are symbols that show what notifications you have (F for Facebook, an envelope icon for mail etc). And if you happen to play games such as Real Racing 3 HD and Dungeon Hunter, which require that you wait for upgrades and the like to be completed, you’ll be notified when they are done. Pulling down from the top on the left side of the screen shows the standard notifications panel. You can pinch-to-zoom on many notifications to expand them, negating the need to open them. There are options to “reply”, “comment” and “delete” directly from the notifications panel (depending on what the notification is for). When music is playing there is a card with buttons for play/pause and skipping tracks. Tapping on the card will open the music app and take you to the song that’s currently playing. Pulling down from the top right of the screen opens some quick settings, as well as the settings app. The quick settings are Brightness, Wifi, battery percentage, Airplane Mode, Bluetooth, and Auto Rotate or Rotation locked which can be switched with just a tap If the alarm is on a direct link to it is housed here as well. These are all excellent time-saving shortcuts, many of which I use multiple times a day. Google Now is heavily integrated into the Nexus 7’s software; there is a bar along the top of the home screen that when tapped on will launch Google Now, and tapping on the microphone symbol will immediately launch voice search. Swiping up from the home key will also launch Google Now. Web browsing 8 The Nexus 7 a great tablet for surfing the web and checking your favorite websites. Pinch-to-zoom is smooth, but due to the low resolution pictures look pixelated when zoomed in all the way, and text, especially large text, has jagged edges. Pages load moderately fast, and scrolling is smooth most of the time, although there is random stuttering, a universal problem with the Chrome mobile browser. Switching between tabs is a breeze: all you need to do is swipe from the right or left side of the screen, depending on which side the tab you want to get to is located. Sharing is wonderfully easy, and there is a wide variety of things you can do with pages. You can share pages to all the common social networks, so long as you’ve downloaded the app for it. Another great feature that is not present in all other browsers is the ability to request desktop versions of websites. Social 6 The Google Play store offers a large variety of Social apps. Most of them feel very optimized for touch, and comfortable to use, but the Facebook app for Android looks like a phone app increased in size to fit a larger screen. This is mainly apparent when holding the tablet in landscape mode and scrolling through the news feed, as pictures look too big and take up the entire screen. The 1.2mp VGA camera is poor for video chat, which is extremely disappointing due to the fact that video chat is the sole purpose of the camera. My friend, who was using the Nexus 7, looked noticeably pixelated and somewhat washed out. Most likely you’ll want to look to a different camera, unless this is the only one available. The Email and Gmail apps are great; they have mostly the same capabilities, yet different ways of doing them. Emails always have a check-box next to them, so no edit button is required to manage them. The Gmail app does allow you to swipe email away, either archiving them or deleting them, you can decide in the Settings for the app. Email lacks this feature. Once you have check-marked any emails you want, you can easily move them around, delete or archive them, and mark them as read or unread. All emails have a star to the right of them which you can tap on to put them in the Starred folder. The Nexus 7 comes with Google’s own Android Keyboard which includes Trace (Google’s version of Swype). Unfortunately there is absolutely no haptic feedback built into the Nexus 7, something that I really like about other Android devices. Trace works very well, and I found it more efficient than typing the “normal” way. Gaming 6 Gaming on the Nexus 7 is a lot of fun. It’s a great compromise between screen size, physical size and weight. Performance is excellent on the less graphically intensive games; Temple Run 2 is very smooth, Angry Birds Space of course plays without a hitch, and even Real Racing 3 HD runs like butter. I then moved on to what very well could be the most graphically intensive game available for mobile platform: The Dark Knight Rises. The initial menu load is very quick, but as is usual with this game, loading missions takes a very long time: about 40 seconds. Immediately after loading the game has some terrible lag, but after a few minutes things get smoother. Grappling and gliding are fluid, but kicking and punching are unfortunately hit-and-miss in terms of lag. Media 5 I will start out by saying that this tablet is definitely not made for taking pictures. There is no rear-facing camera, and not even a built in app for using the front-facing one. An app can be downloaded from the Play Store for taking pictures…although I doubt you’ll find it very worthwhile. Pictures are very grainy and color reproduction poor. Forget about zooming in, as the image will become unrecognizable. The speakers are disappointing. Even during loud parts of the song the Nexus 7 barely managed to fill a small room, and as the dynamics changed to quieter parts of the song, the melody became hard to pick out. As I mentioned in the design section, holding this tablet in landscape mode or setting it down severely distorts and mutes the speaker. The 7” display is great for watching movies: plenty bright, great saturation and pixels are incredibly hard to distinguish. |
DanielDesign 7
Perhaps you’ve heard of the rubbery back on the Nexus 7 with the cool dimples. It’s awesome. It doesn’t feel as classy as the aluminum iPads, but it’s miles ahead of the plastic Galaxy tablets. Overheating isn’t as common as aluminum, or even most plastics backs. You’ve got the black rubbery back, then a cool silver band of plastic, then more black for the front. Actually, it competes with the iPad for the more minimalistic design, which has it’s pros and cons. There’s a headphone jack and a micro USB port, but unfortunately you can’t add any storage via micro SD. As far as buttons go, there’s only a lock button and a volume rocker; simple is nice, but I like the physical home buttons on iPads and Galaxy tablets. The back pops off, revealing a panel of electronics that makes one think “nope, not gonna touch any of that.” Truly, unless you're more of an expert than I am, don't touch any of it. Display 7 Oh pixel, where art thou? One of the first things I do when I pick up a tablet is search for jagged edges, blurriness, and overall pixelation. On the Nexus 7, my standard pixel hunt was successful, but partially because my eyes are trained. Holding it very close to my face allowed me to spot some jaggedness quite easily, and even at a comfortable viewing distance, I was able to make out individual pixels. It's not as bad as the iPad 2 (which is bad enough to annoy or distract a user), but it is noticeably less sharp than screens like the retina iPad or the new Nexus 7. Viewing angles are solid, I once set it on a table, sat on the ground with my nose resting on the same table, set the Nexus 7 about eight inches from my nose, and watched a movie. I’m not saying this is how you should watch that movie you’re friends are nagging you to see, nor is this posture very strategic if you’re attempting to make more friends, but if you choose to try it, the screen will allow it. The brightness didn’t blow me away, I wouldn’t bet on playing Angry Birds Rio in full sunlight on the beach, but it’s bright enough for most usage. I found auto brightness to be fairly accurate, which is always nice. Colors seemed fairly accurate, no complaints there. Overall, it’s a great screen, but clearly, it could be better (yes, that’s a pun). Battery Life 7 I know what you’re thinking, a tablet that came out Mid-2012 with a quad core processor and an HD screen for $200... how’s that battery gonna hold out? I’d recommend an extra charging cable for travelling, but sub-normal usage should go through a day pretty easily. Just remember, bad things happen when you forget to plug it in at night. You’ve been warned. Also, if you’re planning on leaving it idle for more than a few days, power it down. Standby mode is unusually hard on the battery, so don’t expect it to be full of juice when you want to wake it up from a long nap. There isn’t a handy power saver mode either, so you’ll have to manually kill brightness and other settings to save the last few bits of batts. User Interface 8 Usually hailed as the best version of Android available to man, Google’s own stock Jelly Bean comes on the Nexus 7. One of the things I like about having a Nexus device: the day Google announced Android 4.3, every Nexus 7 could upgrade to it. If you like the idea of staying up to date on the latest and greatest software, Nexus and iPads are your best options. The user interface is similar to most android devices, except simpler. It’s not as simple as iOS, and the Home Screen can get cluttered if you aren’t careful, but a little creativity can get you an awesome setup with your home screen. To my knowledge, there isn’t an official way to add or remove pages on your home screen, so you’ll probably be stuck with 5 pages on your home screen until Google decides to be nice to us and add this simple feature. Overall, you won’t get all of the apps of a tablet with Samsung’s TouchWiz on stock android, but in my opinion, that’s what the Play store is for. Customization is a lot more existant than on Apple’s OS, it’s a great UI for the creative type. I did notice some general performance inconsistencies, but nothing happened enough to be annoying. Web Browsing 8 Google’s built a lot of great features into chrome, actually several great features from the desktop version made their way onto Android. Several are also missing, but that’s alright. Basically, Google’s trying to get as much Google as possible into your digital life, so if you use Chrome, they want to get you to use as many other Google services as possible. On Android, they already have most of those services baked into the OS, so they don’t need to put it in their mobile version of Chrome. For example, you don’t have access to the Chrome app market with the Nexus 7, but who cares because you have access to Google Play, and that’s better. If there’s a particular app or extension on Chrome that you couldn’t live without, you might want to check if an equivalent is on Google Play before buying an Android device. Other than that, performance was better than a lot of devices I’ve seen, but lag still gets annoying. iOS devices on the same wifi connection scroll a lot smoother. Rendering is fast though, even on just a couple mbps download speed, images loaded super fast, and stayed loaded. On your standard web page with some pictures (even with quite a few pictures), I could barely make out some blurriness from unloaded images when I scrolled really fast. The real frustration I have with Android web browsing is the stuttering and lag, which really isn’t horrible, but I’ll shout for joy if Android 5.0 fixes it. Social 7 From what I can tell, Google Play has pretty much any social app you’ll ever need. Most definitely, if a major social network has an app on any app market, they’ve probably got it on Google Play too. There’s even a few free SMS apps, which could be nice if you don’t want a phone. Anyway, Google’s got their own stock keyboard preinstalled on Nexus devices, as you can imagine, and it’s really the only keyboard on Android that I like so far (If you have a favorite from the Play store, let me know in the comments and I’ll check it out). Predictive typing really sped things up for me, autocorrect is really accurate, as is Trace typing. I was seriously annoyed with the keyboard sounds. I like the standard click when you tap most everything in the OS, much better than Samsung’s sickening bloops, but I cringed when I click click clicked away on the keyboard, and I had a few people ask me to turn off the sound. The only way to stop the keyboard clicking is to mute the device, which I think is ridiculous. Each key lights up blue while your finger is on it, which is supposed to be some kind of feedback, but I found myself typing the wrong letters a lot and not realizing it until later. Letters show as uppercase on the keyboard when you’re going to type an uppercase letter next, and vice versa. It’s nice, but at first it’s a little distracting when suddenly your keys are all different. Google’s voice to text is great if you’re patient and you know how to talk to it. The camera showed great color reproduction and clarity when video chatting, but it didn’t blow me away. Gaming 7* My objective was simple: win. And win I did, my plan was perfectly executed, and victory was so, so sweet. Stormtrooper pigs were smashed, Gotham’s criminals were beaten and pulped, and malfunctioning robots were blasted to bits. Kilometers and miles were traveled in Temple Run 2 and Real Racing 3. The Nexus 7 stuck with me through thick and thin; graphically intensive games like The Dark Knight rises stuttered a little and rendered a fairly low frame rate, but it was still playable. It’s hard to believe there will be a day when the it can’t play a very many games, but that day is coming. The Nexus 7 has a quad core Tegra 3 processor with 12 of Nvidia’s GPU cuda cores, and I’m betting it won’t be up for new games designed with the Tegra 4 or the Snapdragon 800 in mind. I can’t give a blanket recommendation to try every high-end game on Google Play, but any game that’s built well shouldn’t cause any problems. EPOCH was excellent, Real Racing 3 had some lag and the occasional low frame rates, but for the most part it was solid. Of course, Temple Run 2 and Angry Birds had no issues, but I would like to mention that I am the king of Temple Run 2. My high score is, well... pretty high. Nothing else really needs to be said, and I don’t want to brag or anything. I’m just the best. Media 6* The natural problem with having an Android device is that you don’t get access to iTunes. Google Play has probably an equally good selection, but particularly with HD movies, I found their prices to be consistently higher than iTunes prices. It’s generally only a couple dollars, but I had a hard time justifying a movie purchase on Play when I could get it for cheaper on iTunes and just not watch it on my Nexus 7. (Update: Recently I compared Google Play and iTunes prices for HD movies, and found them to be consistently equal) I was also sad to find that Amazon instant streaming isn’t available on the Nexus 7. So basically, I watched Netflix, and it was great! Well, as long as I had headphones on. Even in a fairly quiet room, I just couldn’t trust those speakers to get an adequate volume out. They were plenty loud enough for gaming, and they would provide some decent background music, even in a fairly large room. I didn’t notice any distortion, but I did find it easy to cover up the speakers with my hand, or by setting the tablet down on it’s back. When covered up, it generally only reduced about 25-50% of the volume, so it wasn’t a huge problem, but they could have been put in a better spot. The good news is, if you’re like me and you have big pockets, the Nexus 7 fits if you really want it to, so going on a walk and listening to music at the same time is doable in a pinch (with earbuds of course). I enjoyed reading Google Play books, especially on a bright, crisp screen that’s plenty portable enough to go everywhere with you. It even has that nifty page turning animation that makes it look more like a real book. |
* Editors note: Score changed to better reflect the reviewer's opinion. (March 17, 2014)
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