Google Nexus 7: First Impressions - PC Magazine

For the past day and a half, I've been trying out Google's Nexus 7 tablet, which was announced and initially distributed at the Google I/O developer conference. I'm not going to give a full review, but I'll share some of my initial impressions.  

In general, it feels more like a competitor of the Kindle Fire or Nook Tabletâ€"focused on content that you download from Google Playâ€"with the option to add Android apps, rather than a completely app-centric tablet like the iPad or other Android tablets.

To begin with, the Asus-built Nexus 7 tablet has a good solid feel. The hardware specifications are quite impressive for a $199 tablet: the 7-inch 1280-by-800 screen is notably better than what you'll see on most 7-inch tablets and pictures and websites generally look quite good. Even with the 16:9 ratio display, the tablet seems to be primarily designed for vertical operation. (The home screen remains vertical, but when you rotate the tablet, most apps rotate with it.) This level of pixel density is particularly good for reading, although it's not up to the level you'll see on the more expensive new iPad; still, on an inexpensive tablet, it's an amazing step forward.

The Nexus 7 has a 1.2GHz quad-core Tegra 3 processor, with 1GB of memory, which seems quite fast for the browsing, media apps, and standard applications I tried. The improvements in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean do seem to have made the OS as a whole work more smoothly. Page loads are quite fast for the most part, and on the whole, it seems quite responsive.

The model I tested had 8GB of flash memory for storage (a 16GB version will cost $299), but unlike some Android tablets, there's no microSD slot for expanding storage. (Note that the Kindle Fire and the iPad also lack this, while the Nook has one.) Other features include a front-facing camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, gyroscope and accelerometer, along with a battery that Google says offers nine hours of HD video playback. At 340 grams, it's lighter than most of the competitors' and easy to carry.  It fits quite well in a coat pocket.

Many of the built-in applications have been enhanced for Jelly Bean. When you start it, the main home screen shows "My Library" with your books, music, magazine, and videos. (Like most Android implementations, there are multiple start screens and you can move between them.) The standard icons on the bottom of the screen include one for Google's own apps, plus those for books, magazine, video, music, and Google Play, as well as one that takes you to a list of all the apps you have installed. Again, this makes it feel much more like a media consumption device, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Overall, content availability on Google Play still feels like a work in progress. Google is adding content quickly, and there seems to be a good selection of music, but the movies and TV selection available for download seems less complete than Amazon's store or iTunes. The number of magazines is also still pretty limited.

The whole system is designed for content that lives on Google's servers; most items have a "keep on device" icon if you want it available for offline consumption.    

In general, I found the Google apps work fine but aren't as polished as some of the competitors'. In books, you can set bookmarks, but they don't seem to be able to highlight and store particular passages.    

The magazines I looked at were not very interactive and the fonts often look as if the pages are more images than rendered fonts.

Browsing has changed, with Jelly Bean including Chrome as the standard browser, multiple tabs, the ability to sync tabs across multiple devices, and a fast rendering engine. I like it a lot. Note, though, that Android 4.1 no longer supports Flash.

Applications remain a bit of a muddle. There are plenty of Android applications, of course, but relatively few that are optimized for tablet use. Google is trying to address that by highlighting "tablet-certified" apps in its app store, but it's still a pretty small list. 

The tablet version of the New York Times app, for instance, still looks mostly like a phone app.

It's unclear how serious Google will be about the Nexus 7. At the keynote, the company said the device will be available for sale online in mid-July, but it didn't say anything about retail sales, so it may still want to keep that market clear for its OEMs. (It will be particularly interesting to see what Amazon has to offer with its rumored Kindle Fire update.)

Still, despite a few glitches, I have come away pretty impressed. It does a good job of running standard Android apps, playing music and videos, and displaying books. It's not an iPadâ€"its display is larger and it has more tablet-tuned appsâ€"but it's not trying to be. Instead, at $199, it's a good deal and I'm impressed, particularly for the price.