Nexus 7 - First Impressions

My latest purchase was Google’s new tablet the Nexus 7; I bought it off one of my friends parents who longed for something bigger. So far I love it, I’ve found the 7” form factor to be surprisingly good, and I thought it would be too small, but it’s pretty much perfect small enough to be highly portable and big enough that watching films and taking notes is still comfortable. Its fits well in my hands at 340g it feels just right the weight and the textured back adds a really nice look as well as feel to the tablet.

I’ve tried out a fair few apps so fair, ranging from games to note taking to media apps. I acquired quite a few games from the Humble Bundles for Android; you should check them out if you’re in the market. They look rather stunning on the 1280x800 IPS display, as well as being beautiful the screen is responsive too, everything you do on it feels fluid although I suspect that’s in part due to the Tegra 3 quad core. As for note taking apps I’ve tried out Evernote which seems to be the one everyone recommends, typing on the nexus is good but not great it’s fine for jotting some quick notes however for typing long documents I may consider investing in an external keyboard of some kind. Another use that I found for my nexus is an eReader, I’ve been using the amazon kindle app to read various books as well as putting quite a few of my textbooks from college on to their which has lightened my bag considerably.

As for using it as a multimedia device, the 16 GB storage in mine leaves plenty of room for videos and music. The built in speaker is surprisingly good, all I expected from it was some tinny white noise but it can put out a lot of volume of acceptable quality. The display leaves any videos you want to watch looking rather gorgeous, by default the nexus 7 can’t play every video format so I recommend that you install DICE player or a similar app also the regular file manager can’t access your network so you’re probably going to want to look for a 3rd party one of those too, I’m using ES file explorer but you’ll need to be rooted to use this one on a network. The streaming on it is also pretty good, I experienced no buffering times at all when streaming some HD films across my network to the device it plays incredibly smoothly.

There are however a few flaws with the Nexus 7, for instance the lack of any kind of external storage baffles me, why on earth they didn’t include a micro SD card slot is beyond me. Another flaw that I mentioned earlier is the on screen keyboard isn’t the greatest experience; however that is expected to improve in android 4.2. As for external an external keyboard you would have to go third party as neither Google nor Asus have made one specifically for the tablet in fact speaking of accessories there are almost none available for the device other that a rubber case, a docking station would have been nice at least though it is rumoured one is in the works.

Overall the tablet is awesome the hits out way the misses by a long shot and I can highly recommend it to anyone in the market for a new tablet, the Nexus 7 is a genius creation with a million and one different uses.