Hello everyone,
Here we are with our Nexus 7 review
A seven inch tablet, running the Google android operating system
Jelly Bean 4.1.
OK, so spec wise, what are we looking at here?
Well, it's a seven inch screen, running at 1280 x 800 so that makes it HD
it's actually slightly higher than 720p.
And that gives you pixels per inch of 216
which is not massive, you're not talking retina.
It has a backlit IPS display
that means you're going to have a very bright picture.
Still not brilliant outdoors but it's good enough.
Scratch resistant Gorilla glass coating, now it's only Gorilla glass 1 from
what I can tell
so don't go out with a chisel will you!?
But you should be good for nexus 7 review
a bit of money in your pocket, keys what have you, anything that scratches against it,
or any light abrasions that may occur while you are using it.
1.2 megapixel front facing camera,
There is no rear facing camera on this unit.
For whatever reason, probably cost, they decided to leave one out.
The front facing camera is 1.2 megapixels.
That's not very good.
Great for Skype, you're not going to want to take any holiday snaps with that camera.
Overall weight, 340g so if you put that against something like the Samsung Galaxy S3
at around 136g, you're talking around twice the weight.
It's not
overly heavy.
You can use this device one-handed and feel quite comfortable with it.
It's not like an iPad where you're always going to want to keep two hands on it
just in case it
tips out of your grip.
Memory wise, you're looking at 8 or 16 gigs worth of memory and it's not
expandable.
There is no SD card slot in this device.
Really the Nexus 7 tablet is aimed to be a cloud storage based device
so you've got 16gig of storage on your pad
but then if you're going to be storing anything nexus 7 review
you're going to pop it up into the cloud
and stream it back down
or store it in Google play if you purchased it from there and retrieve it when you need it.
These devices are not designed to hold all of your most precious
memories or anything like that, Very much relies on the cloud storage side of things
to keep long-term nature as it were
things like apps you can just download them again when you need them.
The actual internal memory, or system memory
is 1gig. That is
pretty ample actually.
I found that running even games like Bard's Tale which uses a huge
amount of system resources
with big textures etcetera,
never even sweats it . One gig is more than ample on the Nexus 7.
Your battery, the most important part of any tablet,
Your battery is 4,325mAH.
She'll run for nine hours with HD video playback
ten hours of web browsing and 10 hours of e-reading, 300 hours on standby.
In real terms I would say you're looking more into seven-and-a-half hours of
video watching.
Key to all of this is
How bright is your screen at the time
and have you got anything else running in the background like GPS
that's going to drain the battery. To get nine hours of HD video playback you're pretty much
talking about turning the wifi off, turning
the brightness down to a lower setting, closing all the background tasks that might be running,
chewing up memory etcetera.
The CPU,
quad core Tegra 3 processor.
This thing is a beast for gaming.
You're looking at a processor that's designed specifically for gaming on the go.
The overall size of the unit, 198.5mm x 520mm x 10.45mm.
It makes it pretty thin but not quite iPad 2 iPad 3 thin but
approaching it.
But obviously a much smaller overall profile
the footprint as we call it.
Your wireless is
so if you've got a memo style router
with two antennas it will connect to that and use full speed quite happily
and has built-in bluetooth as well which is 2.1 ED profile I believe.
So should be good for all of your wireless audio
as well as things like
keyboard, mice etcetera.
Micro usb is on the bottom
and it's running android 4.1 which is the latest update from Google.
Features wise, extras,
You have microphone,
those are noise cancelling by the way, nfc which is a major plus point on
any kind of device these days with mobile wallet payments and
so on becoming more popular.
Accelerometer
necessary for any kind of game that requires to understand orientation,
the GPS, a magnometer and gyroscope really just rounding out the features
there on a standard mobile phone. Let's take a look at the hardware itself.
As you can see here, a very bright beautiful looking screen.
If we just turn this device on to its edges,
you can see
quite a thin profile.
There is one of the noise cancelling microphones there.
There is actually one on the top and one on the side so
depending on which orientation you are holding the device in you won't always be covering both of the microphones.
There's always one spare.
The back of the device...
On the back of the device we have quite a nice rubberised finish.
It actually is quite grippy.
Doesn't feel too slippy, like the Samsung Galaxy S3 can.
and also the iPad 3 feels a little bit slippy in the hands
at times.
Basis logo on the back and there is the speaker grille.
The all-important speaker grille. They've made it quite big and beefy.
If you're in a room with just a couple of people, it's very very loud.
If you're out and about in town or something, like that, it's not the loudest.
You're not going to be listening to it in a restaurant,
or something like that., or McDonalds.
It just doesn't quite have enough bass to it for my liking but
that's what you get when you have
a reasonably tight priced tablet
with obviously a single speaker grille as it were.
I'm not too sure if that's mono or stereo to be honest. It sounds fairly mono.
Serial number on the bottom there
They didn't put that sticker on particularly well
and on the base
headphone jack on the bottom
and your mini usb.
Having the headphone jack on the bottom is awkward if you
listen to music.
Same with the pad in your pocket.
I've actually found that I can get this device in my overcoat without a
problem,
but then try to listen to music on it,
not good, not good at all.
Just the orientation when you then want to get it out of your pocket
if you want to change tracks quickly,
it's not going to work for you
particularly well, just because of where that orientation is you're then going to
have to have the pad upside down or rotate it.
On top of the device, you can see the front facing camera here and on the side
you have power and your volume rockers. nexus 7 review
And that is pretty much all the features as it were on the hardware side of things
That's pretty much all hardware features as it were on this device.
Let's delve into the software a little bit.
So, as I say, this comes with android 4.1 Jelly Bean. This is the latest and greatest
operating system from Google for the android devices.
Incredibly fast.
One thing they really
push for Jelly Bean is to make android a lot quicker and feel more
responsive.
So part of that is Project Butter which is the speed at which interface elements are able
to redraw on to the screen.
Everything is now aligned across the hardware, the software
and the display redraw.
So you now find that things are very very quick and responsive.
You're moving through menus at lightning speed all the time, very
little pause or
waiting around with this device.
Add to that the Tegra 3 processor and
from a game perspective
you're looking at a really, really, solid piece of kit.
Take a quick look in settings.
For instance,
if we go into battery
in here you can see what's been drawing most power
on the system
screen 62%
and twenty hours on 82% discharged.
Much more power efficient, I find Jelly Bean to be honest with you.
The account system is now more logically laid out as well
so within your Nexus now each of the accounts for various services you use are listed under accounts
They're not buried in accounts under another row of settings.
Much easier to go into and quickly tweak something if you want to.
Language, location services, security, things just seem to be
rearranged.
Data usage is still here as well so you can see what's costing you
the most for data downloads.
There is going to be a 3G version of the Nexus 7 released probably at the
end of October, that will include a
3G wireless signal
so that if you have a mobile phone contract you can pop a mobile phone SIM in
and then get
data on the go.
Other than that, you are locked just down to wifi on the Nexus 7 currently.
OK, let's have a quick look at a game on here.
Let's have a look at Grand Theft Auto 3
tenth anniversary edition.
Well-known title.
Graphically quite fantastic on a mobile device
for obvious reasons it's a Playstation game running on a mobile device
they've uprated the textures, lighting, and so on so it's generally
a lot more crisp than the original versions would be
with Playstation 2.
Let's have a look at the opening in cinematic because it tends to be
quite groovy.
If you've tried this game on older devices
you'll know how
the game can sometimes stutter and stall, you can see here it's really fluid
all those camera motions,
camera shake and so on working really nicely.
On HTC Desire for instance it was pretty much unplayable.
The Nexus 7 makes a fantastic portable gaming device, why would anyone buy a PSV2
when this is 199? nexus 7 review
Do you know what I mean?
It kind of boggles the mind really. There's so much more flexibility
so much more that you can do with this
and gameplay graphics wise we're waiting
for developers just to up the quality of the textures, quality of the lighting and titles
you're looking at something that will approach the PSV for style, sure maybe not at
60 frames a second all of the time. Blimey! Gameplay's a lot better in most cases.
As you can see, the graphics are just fantastic, let's skip into a little bit of gameplay.
As you can see,
it's nice and smooth, no stuttering particularly there.
Previously, when you started driving off the line and you saw a bit of stutter
at this first bend.
Very smooth, very responsive
just as it needs to be.
So there you are.
The nexus 7 review is a fantastic all round tablet
and it also makes for a fantastic gaming device.
Integra 3 chip really, really moves.