Asus Google Nexus 7

Google’s Nexus 7 tablet is not exactly a surprise. Nor is the fact that I’m able to work on a review of the product just hours after the device was announced. For years now, Google has had the uncanny habit of not only making big announcements at its I/O events, but then immediately sharing what it has shown off with developers and members of the press.
This year was over the top. Not only did Google hand out its new, 7-inch, $199 Nexus 7 tablet, but it also introduced a new version of Android (4.1) called Jelly Bean, upgraded its flagship phone, and... rolled out the Nexus Q. Perhaps the most odd of all, the Q is a spherical media player / amp which functions as a wired audio and video output for all of your Google content.
But the main course is obviously the tablet — a stock Google experience with a price point clearly meant to put a hurt on Amazon’s Kindle Fire, and sway potential buyers of Apple's lower-end iPad 2. Android as a tablet platform has stumbled thus far — can Google finally begin to make an impact in an increasingly crowded market? Read on for my full review to find out.




For a $200 tablet, the Asus-made Nexus 7 is impressively built and styled. Like most other tablets, what you mainly see is a glossy, black-bezeled display. In this case, that display is ringed by a matte silver band which looks like metal, but is a rigid plastic. Around back, the device is covered in a soft-touch, dimpled material which has the feel of taut leather. Amusingly, Android design chief Matias Duarte told me that the idea was to mimic "Steve McQueen style" driving gloves — and the effect is definitely there.
On the bottom ridge of the device is a Micro USB port and on the right side (in portrait mode) you’ll find the volume rocker and sleep / power button. On the left edge, there are surface "pogo plug" connectors for a dock, and on the front of the Nexus there’s a small camera embedded in the upper bezel.
The tablet weighs 0.74 pounds (compared with the Kindle Fire’s 0.9 pounds), is 0.41 inches thick (the new iPad is 0.37 inches), and measures 7.8 inches tall by 4.7 inches wide.

Inside the Nexus 7 you’ll find a quad-core Tegra 3 CPU clocked to 1.15GHz on four cores (or 1.3 GHz when running on just one), 1GB of RAM, and 8GB or 16GB of onboard storage (that extra storage will cost you an additional $50). Sorry, active downloaders — there’s no microSD slot here. In fact, the Nexus 7’s back panel is not removable at all. The device also packs in Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, and has a GPS chip, NFC, gyroscope, compass, and accelerometer. It’s also got a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera, as well as a speaker embedded around the back of the device, and what appear to be a pair (there are two identical holes) of built-in microphones.
That camera isn’t really useful for anything but Google+ Hangouts and the like — though it certainly gets the job done. If you’re one of those people who likes to snap pics with their tablet — first, shame on you. Second, you’re probably out of luck here. There’s no camera app on the device. You can find a third-party replacement, and I did get one to work, but most of the popular camera apps don’t even show up in the Play Store.
There’s no 3G or 4G data service onboard, and the storage limitation might be vexing to some users, but there’s also little to complain about for a tablet at this price. In terms of sheer specs, there’s nothing here to prevent the Nexus 7 from being every bit as useful and usable as its bigger counterparts and competition — even the iPad.


The Nexus 7 boasts a 1280 x 800 LCD display that’s covered with "Corning glass," which I assume means Gorilla Glass. The screen is 216 ppi if you’re keeping count — and it shows. Text and images look crisp and clear on the 7-inch screen — not Retina display quality, but not too far off either. Colors on the screen looked a bit washed out when compared to the Super AMOLED of the Galaxy Nexus, but I’ll chalk that up to the exaggerated saturation of that phone’s screen. Next to the new iPad, things looked a little more balanced.
Viewing angles were surprisingly good too, though I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the screen off-center. For those of you that do, fear not.


Performance on the Nexus 7 was zippy. Snappy. Buttery, if you will. We already know that the Tegra 3 chipset is no slouch, and it felt particularly slouch-free on this tablet.
General OS performance was excellent — helped undoubtedly by Android 4.1 and its "Project Butter" initiative which is said to vastly improve touch response and smoothness in Android. Apps were also quick to open and close, and speedy in use. In particular, 3D gaming that was optimized for the Tegra chipset looked stunning and held steady frame rates, and basic tasks like multitasking were nearly instantaneous.
I do have some minor gripes about some of the scrolling action I saw. I think in an attempt to smooth out and stabilize the performance of Android, Google may have created some very minor "snap back" issues when scrolling around quickly. To my eyes, this is definitely a software problem, but I didn’t see similar issues on the Galaxy Nexus with Jelly Bean, so this will remain a question mark. Simply put, sometimes when you’re scrolling quickly (say, on the homescreen), the scroll will not follow your finger, and instead snap back the page to the one you were trying to move away from. I only saw this crop up occasionally when I was moving around at speed, so I don’t think most users will notice or care. It’s a nitpick... but that’s what I get paid to do.


In the short period of testing I’ve had so far, battery life seems pretty solid — certainly about what you should expect out of a device of this size and with this technology footprint. In our rundown tests, I squeezed roughly six hours out of a fully charged device on 65 percent brightness, with webpages loading constantly. Your mileage when gaming, watching video, and using more CPU-intensive apps will obviously vary. I'd also expect significantly higher battery life when using the Nexus 7 for simple tasks like video and music playback that allow the Tegra 3 to fall back to its power-sipping "companion core," but unless you’re using it as an overgrown PMP or you’re on a really long flight, you won’t stay in that low-power mode forever.
In general, the amount of power drain felt relatively predictable, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I didn't find myself reaching for a recharge while I was putting it through its paces, and I expect most users will have a similar experience.