Google Nexus 7 tablet review

Google Nexus 7 tablet review: for wide, but not deep, pockets

It's small, cheap, has limited storage (and no expansion) and no HDMI out. Is Google's long-expected self-branded 7in tablet - made by Asus - a challenger in this space?

Google's Nexus 7 tablet. Don't worry, you don't need three hands to operate it. Photograph: Stephen Lam/Reuters

When the iPad first came out, with its 4:3 aspect ratio and 9.7in screen, lots of people were quick to call it a "just a large iPod Touch" - even though the aspect ratio alone indicated that it wasn't, and the performance and interaction quickly reinforced that.

Well, those people don't have to worry any more. Here's Google's Nexus 7 "tablet", with a 16:9 aspect ratio and 7in screen (measured, as they all are, on the diagonal). And we can happily say that this is a "large" Android smartphone. Except it only comes in a Wi-Fi version.

Asus built this tablet to Google's recipe, apparently after Google decided that Amazon's Kindle Fire (which uses a forked version of Android that doesn't use Google's services) had found a profitable niche, while all the 10in Android tablets have been getting whomped by the iPad, which still has something like 60% of the entire tablet market.

So here are the topics.
Turn, turn… don't turn then
Hardware
Screen and camera
Battery: call that a life?
Software
Consumer or creator?
Media: get thee to the cloud
Compared (inevitably) to the iPad
Conclusion
Other reviews
Comments: responses

The strange thing about the Nexus 7 is that it thinks that it's a phone. The first indication you get of this is when you turn it on and set it up (I've already got a Google account with various Google Play apps, so this took no time - although I didn't get the automatic download of apps I was expecting). Hold the Nexus 7 in portrait mode, press the (virtual) home key, and you're presented with a bright home screen.

Ah, but this is a tablet. So let's turn it on its side, because one tends to think of tablets as landscape-viewing objects, right?

I spin you round, round, Nexus, right round

I turned the device to landscape orientation. The home screen stayed in portrait. I turned it upside down. The home screen stayed.

This is not an accident, nor me overlooking a setting. This is intentional, according to Google's Dianne Hackborn, who posted an explanation (on Google+, natch). "Some people have commented that the UI on the Nexus 7 isn't a scaled down version of the 10" UI," Hackborn wrote. "This is somewhat true. It is also not just the phone UI shown on a larger display. Various parts of the system and applications will use one or the other UI (or even a mix) depending on what works best."

The trouble is that Google - for reasons best known to itself - has chosen to go with the phone UI not the (rotatable) tablet UI for this. It means that you can hold the phone - er, tablet - on its side or even upside-down (that is, with the headphone jack at the top) and the home screen won't rotate.

This leads to some strange transitions. Many apps understand that they may be used on a tablet (Hackborn tells developers to expect that, and to let Jelly Bean handle the transition and consequent resizing), and so orient themselves when you hold them in landscape. But hit the home button to go back and - bam! - you're forced back to portrait mode. This is jarring. OK, so if you use the fast app-switching shortcut, you can avoid that (the shortcut, showing the list of last-used applications and screens, orients itself correctly), but there will always come times when you go back to the home screen, and some of them will be landscape mode. This will, I think, always be a tiny prod at the device's failings - unless you either root it and fix it, or Google updates the software. There's simply no chance that the mass market will do the former.

Google Nexus 7 on the left, the RIM PlayBook on the right. The PlayBook does rotate its home screen. Photograph: Charles Arthur/guardian.co.uk

And just to point how absurd this is: the picture shows the Nexus 7 beside the much-taunted RIM PlayBook. Both are showing their home screens. Guess which one rotates the screen automatically depending on position?

Hardware impressions

It's small, light, the back is nicely contoured, and the front has no physical buttons. It's actually quite difficult to work out which is the top side (unless you have the home screen visible..); the headphone jack, it turns out, is on the bottom (so the headphone cable wouldn't dangle over the screen, as it otherwise might if it were on the top, says Asus) and the power button and volume rocker controls on the top right.

It's light enough, and slips - just about - into an inside jacket pocket. (Or, at a guess, a handbag.) If it had phone capabilities, and voice control, you could almost imagine this as a future of communication - big enough to watch videos on, but capable enough too to make phone calls. But VOIP aside, this is a Wi-Fi only device. Google doesn't see it as a smartphone rival.

It's all-plastic, and one consequence of the small screen size is that the non touch-sensitive bezel feels as though it takes a much larger proportion of the screen compared to the iPad. But overall, nothing to object to; the build quality is good, and I found no flexing or other defects. Weight at 340g is such that you'll barely notice it in a pocket.

Screen and camera

Is 1280x800 (that's a non-retina 216 pixels per inch). There's only a front-facing camera, for all those VOIP video calls you're going to make.

Battery life

Worth mentioning high up. Asus (which made the gadget) claims 9.5 hours. I charged it on a Wednesday, streamed about 10 minutes of a movie (Transformers: Dark of the Moon - my brain couldn't bear watching any longer than that) on Thursday, and by Friday morning with no extra interaction it was dead. This wasn't a one-off - the battery simply didn't seem to hold charge. It's quite possible (probably even) that this was due to some peculiarity such as pre-production firmware, since the test device came from Google.

But if you haven't bought or ordered one of these yet, I would watch to see what early adopters say about its endurance.

Software

Non-rotating Home screen apart, you're dying to know what Android 4.1 - aka Jelly Bean - is like, aren't you? Well, I can report: it's very much like Honeycomb, except it's more like Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS). Actually, it is ICS, but tweaked and twingled in ways too small to be very obvious. (Plus it was hard sometimes to know whether a difference was due to the sort-of-tabletness, or the new OS.)

Despite the efforts of Hugo Barra and team, there are still inconsistencies throughout Android - such as where the "contextual menu" button (a stack of short lines) is: sometimes it's at the top right of the screen, but sometimes it's at the bottom right.

If you haven't used ICS, it has a new method of switching between apps, as mentioned above, which shows the recently-used apps with a thumbnail. Since I had the PlayBook out, I compared its UI; and found I preferred it. Swipe up from below to get to the running apps display, swipe left and right to move among them, swipe an app in that display up to kill it. Neat.

Android still has (and I noticed it a surprising amount on this) the sporadic "Sorry, X has stopped working" where X is an app you were using - and where the notice may or may not mean that the app has died. A question: do you need to be told if an app has died? On the iPhone and iPad, where it happens just as often, you are simply dumped back in the home screen, so you have to infer that something's happened. Not user-informative, but error messages are inherently geeky, and can make people feel they've done something wrong - which of course they generally haven't.

One new annoyance (and it is): Android's openness means that if you have multiple programs that can do something (eg open a PDF) then you're presented with a choice of which one to perform it with. So, are you opening that PDF with Amazon Kindle, or the Adobe Reader? You prod "Reader". Nothing happens. You press again, Still nothing. Then you notice that the bottom dialog box also has "Always" and "Just once". Before anything can happen, you have to press one of those. They're so understated, though, that you can easily miss them.

On PDFs, by the way, the Kindle performs miles better than Adobe Reader - which, despite having a quad-core CPU behind it, struggles to render pages in a timely fashion. When that option box comes up, press "Kindle" and "Always", or regret it.

The range of software is growing, gradually, but the Nexus 7's insistence that it's sort of a phone means that often you'll want to hold it in portrait. And that's when it will feel most like a large phone - except of course that it isn't a phone because it won't text, or make calls. And comparable apps on Android still often feel like the clunky sibling compared to iOS ones.

Consumer or creator?

You know that argument about whether the iPad is a content consumption or creation device? The Nexus 7 is a content consumption device for the large part. Twitter and Facebook might be fine, but you're not going to be editing spreadsheets or documents in a hurry.

Media: get thee to the cloud

The Nexus 7 comes with 8GB or 16GB of onboard storage. You can't add any more to the device itself. No USB ports for Flash drives; no SD card slots; no HDMI out. What is Google playing at?
Asus has indicated to me that this was Google's idea; that what it wants is for everyone to use its services in the cloud. This would be great, and clever, if everyone was guaranteed excellent high-speed broadband connectivity everywhere. Sadly, we're not all on Google's work buses, so broadband isn't necessarily fast, or reliable.
Furthermore, 8GB - 8 gigabytes! - really isn't very much even for music, and once you add a few apps, and some documents in Dropbox, and perhaps a film, the idea of carrying this around and listening to music on the train (you'd use it on the train, right?) suddenly recedes. Google hasn't got any music deals lined up in the UK, which rules out streaming from Google Music (remember how Google Music was going to challenge iTunes? Happy times) and makes this less useful again. Of course, there is Spotify, but when you're on the train you're either going to have to use your phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot (which will chew up your monthly data allowance) or get a Spotify subscription for offline listening.
In fact, the problem with Google's approach was said far more eloquently by a commenter, Nawoa Lanor, in the Dianne Hackborn G+ thread, so here it is:

- Many places/plans have limited transfer caps. Canada's infamous for very high prices and very low transfer caps since our internet companies bought our media companies and now it's the only way they can stay solvent with Netflix (etc) on the market
- Your cloud [music and picture] services aren't even available outside the US.
- You only offer cloud storage for music and pictures, not video, and video's the thing that takes the most storage.
- Your cloud services are AFAIK locked down tight from any third parties. If I want to play my Google Play music in a music player I like better such as PowerAmp, too bad. Even if you offered cloud video storage and transfer caps weren't a concern, I wouldn't want to be limited to your video app. MX Player is leaps and bounds ahead in features and functionality.
It's my opinion that Google intentionally crippled the Nexus 7 in this single but important way in order to avoid pissing off their OEM partners too much by making a tablet that has all the features people want and is sold at a loss. Yes, at a loss - that $25 Google Play bonus counts.

When it comes to film, the Google Play store in the UK has a decent selection - there are hundreds of films available to rent, for £3.49 (the same price as the iTunes Store). You don't however get the option of buying, or the HD version; this is where Google is struggling. (Of course, with no HDMI out the lack of an HD buy/rent version is less troubling.)
Films show up fine, although once again there's the little prod of the static home screen. Start there, choose Google Play; it's in portrait. Choose a film; the initial display is in portrait, but then as soon as you start playing the film, you're forced to turn to landscape.
Now, I've never greatly loved the 16:9 aspect ratio used by Android tablets; compared to the 4:3 ratio favoured by Apple with the iPad, the 16:9 seems to give you the option of "too narrow" if you're typing in portrait, or "too wide" in landscape. At least with the smaller screen, either way up is fine for typing.
Google Nexus 7 showing the letterbox effect when watching a film. A lot of horizontal screen is unused. Photograph: Charles Arthur/guardian.co.uk
However when watching a film (the execrable Transformers, formerly mentioned - it came free), something weird happens. The screen is already set up for letterbox format. But the picture is then letterboxed again - so it becomes even wider, and wastes huge chunks of the screen. The playback is perfectly good (and bright and detailed). But it felt odd to have so much screen real estate going to waste when it already wasn't that big.

Compared to an iPad...

Google Nexus 7 next to an Apple iPad. Photograph: Charles Arthur/guardian.co.uk This photo shows how big the Nexus 7 isn't compared to an iPad. Of course, you'd also want to compare the prices - the iPad starts at £329 (2011 model, 32Gb 16Gb, Wi-Fi) while the Nexus 7 costs £159 (8GB) or £199 (16GB version). That's a serious difference - the gulf between affordability and not for many.

Conclusion

Let's just do this simply:
Those in favour: price makes it very affordable; weight and size make it easily portable; good build quality; uses Android, which is familiar even if you haven't used it; good-enough initlal selection of films to rent.
Those against: niggles in software which you'll encounter repeatedly; doubts about battery life (though may be pre-production problem); limited storage; no expandable storage; no HDMI out; apps may treat it as a phone; "letterbox of letterbox" view of films; no 3G option.
So it will suit those with wide (if not deep) pockets who want some Android games, or a bit of music on the go (but more likely streaming video somewhere static).
Overall, I'm more of a stickler about UI things than other people. Personally, I'd give this 7/10 - but the affordability edges it up to four stars rather than down to three on our blunt out-of-five system.