There are three things that you must know about Google’s Nexus 7 tablet. 1) It is a 7 inch tablet. 2) It runs Jelly Bean, and 3) it costs $199.
Steve Jobs famously said that 7 inch tablets were impractical. Too small for reading, surfing, playing games or watching movies, and too big to use as a phone. Well, he was wrong. The 7 inchers have come of age and Google’s Nexus 7 is the beauty of the ball.
MG Siegler, the Techcrunch writer and known Apple fanboy, could not help praising the tablet. “With the Nexus 7, Google has, for the first time, created an Android product that I would buy for myself. And I wouldn’t have an issue recommending it to anyone else,” Siegler wrote.
The 7-inch form factor makes the tablet perfect for many situations for which the 10 inch iPad is not good. For example, reading in bed, wrote Seigler. Also a 7 inch can be used with one hand, a 10 inch tablet can’t, a 7 inch tablet is much more portable, because of its size and weight, which the 10 incher is not.
The Nexus is a beautiful tablet. “It’s sleek and beautiful, with rounded edges, unlike the sawed-off rectangular back of the Fire, and a “pleather” back panel that feels great,” wrote David Pogue of New York Times. The ‘pleather’ refers to the leather-like feel Google was able to achieve on the back panel of the Nexus 7, even though it is made of plastic. The back is easy to hold in the hand, and makes the Nexus look classy.
Now, to the part about the Jelly Bean.
This latest and greatest iteration of Android came with something called Project Butter. The endeavour was to make the whole OS faster and smoother by fixing 60 fps as the default frame rate across the OS. Going by the reviews the effort was success.
“Jelly Bean finally puts Android on a par with Apple’s iOS operating system, which drives the iPhone and iPad, in two key respects: Responsiveness (when the hardware is potent enough) and elimination of the constant need to resort to menus, which plagued most prior versions of Android,” wrote Walt Mossberg of the AllthingsD.
Jelly Bean is fast and responsive, rivalling the iOS in this respect. Its voice assistant, which is fundamentally different than Siri, in that it gives functional information rather than talking with you – has got a more natural voice with Jelly Bean. Google also introduced a new feature called Google Now which supplies information relevant to your time and place – like bus route information when you are at a bus stop – or flight information if you had been searching for it, and so on. Voice dictation works even when offline, (Apple products can’t do that) you can also save Google maps for offline use, and the notification centre has been touched up.
The Nexus 7 also beats the iPad in battery life. In Mossberg’s test, its battery lasted longer than that of the iPad, coming in at 10 hrs 44 minutes, while the iPad logs in 9 hrs and 58 mins.
There are some drawbacks to the Nexus 7.
While it is a fully featured tablet, its storage capacity is just 8 and 16 GB. (Google is about to launch a 32 GB version, which will see the price of the base model go down further).
It does not have expandable storage, and there is no way to beam your content to a TV. Google launched an iTunes like store called the Google Play. But its content offering falls short of both Apple and Amazon. Though apps for Android have been growing fast, it still does not have enough optimized apps for tablets. Thus what you get are scaled version of the phone app. Even though that does not look as bad on a 7 inch tablet as it could on a 10 inch one, especially optimized apps are in a different class altogether.
Despite these failings the $199 price tag makes it a steal. Apple’s iPad comes for $500 dollars. Other 7 inch tablets, like Galaxy Tab from Samsung comes for $250 dollar, and they are not as good.
Source : nvonews
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