Google's Nexus 7 is a milestone for android tablet. The first tablet with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, offers the most bang for the buck you can get in the market right now. It's versatile, well-built, fast, and a lot of fun to use. It basically renders every 7in tablet priced at more than 250 bucks pretty much irrelevant. If Amazon has been wondering whether it should have released the Kindle Fire in the UK earlier, that question has been answered now – now that the Nexus 7 is here, the Fire won’t stand a chance.
Physical features and Internet
The Nexus 7 feels well-built, even classy for such an affordable tablet—and trust me, I've handled plenty of cheap tablets. Kudos goes to the hardware manufacturer, Asus, a company that typically builds good stuff. A Gorilla Glass screen dominates the front of the tablet, and around back, there's a slightly grippy, stippled black rubber panel. At 198.5 x 120 x 10.45mm (HxWxD) and 340g, it's comfortable to hold in one hand for long periods.
Turn the tablet on using the prominent Power button at the top right corner, and you'll see a perfectly fine 1280 x 800, 7in IPS LCD screen with a huge black bezel around it. The screen is higher-res than the Kindle Fire, which clocks in at 1280 x 600. This is one monster of a bezel, and it makes you wonder if the screen could have been larger, or the tablet smaller. The answer is probably, but not for £159. The display is bright enough to see indoors and out, although it's more reflective and less saturated than the high-end AMOLED screens used by the far more expensive tablets.
Performance and apps
The quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset inside is one of the fastest mobile processors around. This unit runs at 1.3GHz in single core mode, and 1.2GHz when two to four cores are active. While our Antutu system benchmark won't run on the new version of Android, we ran a bunch of other benchmarks, including Geekbench and Quadrant for system scores, Browsermark and Sunspider for the Web, and Nenamark for graphics.
System-wise, the Nexus 7 performed on par with other recent Tegra 3 tablets. Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmark, and the Tegra 3 tablets score considerably higher on it than the dual-core Apple iPad does—in this case, 1,472 to the iPad's 761. Graphics performance was rock-solid with a 55.9fps rating in Nenamark, higher than the Asus Transformer Pad TF300.
Games just rock here. I downloaded a few of Nvidia's Tegra Zone titles, and both Zen Pinball and Riptide GP had the smooth ease of control, which marks a really good gaming experience. There was no jerkiness, no lag, and no compromises.
This is the first Google device to install Chrome as the default browser, and that's great; it's about 30 per cent faster than the older stock Android browser, and it has a better tab interface.
The performance news gets even better with Android 4.1 thanks to Butter. That's Google's code-name for a project that makes everything in the Android UI smoother, and it works. Screen transitions are indeed smoother, and there's no lag with the touch keyboard. The whole experience feels more polished and professional than previous Android iterations.
Butter doesn't solve everything, though. Android has problems with processing stylus touch inputs that can make it difficult to use drawing programs. I tried Sketchbook Pro with a stylus and still saw a lag. Android 4.1 apparently fixes this, but consumers won't see the advantage yet because the apps involved need to be retooled for the new OS.
Thus we get to the stickiest issue with Android tablets: The perpetual lack of great apps designed to use high-end hardware. This is less of a problem with Tegra-powered 7in tablets than with larger devices, or those with different chipsets, but it's still an issue. Apps designed for 4in phone screens don't look so bad on 7in tablets (although they don't look great), and Nvidia has been busily helping developers churn out a few dozen super-high-end games for its chips.
However, the comparison between Nexus and ipad seems make no sense. After Google announced its new Nexus 7 tablet last Wednesday during their Google I/O event, Brian White of Topeka Capital Markets stated that Apple need not worry. For him, the search engine giant’s device is “just another Android-based tablet.”
Apple probably doesn’t need to worry about Google’s latest tablet eating into its profit share. In fact, Android chief Andy Rubin admitted the company’s own profit margins for the device are extremely low: “When it gets sold through the (Google) Play store, there’s no margin. It just basically gets (sold) through.” The latest projections from IDC suggest that Apple will take back market share from Android this year, as the Cupertino-based company is expected to achieve 62 percent of the tablet market.
