Colin's Journal

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It’s been a long time since my last post, with the birth of our daughter taking up all of my nonworking time. I have however purchased a Nexus 7, now being able to see how the 7″ tablet running android compares to the playbook.

I haven’t yet tried travelling with the tablet, but for use at home, it blows away the playbook for usefulness. The experience is not perfect by any stretch. The BBC are yet to provide an iPlayer app that works without flash, so you have to use workarounds to watch TV. The Economist, fantastic publication though it is, have produced a rubbish android app that doesn’t support ICS, never mind Jelly Bean.

Putting to one side these niggles, most of the important apps are there and work well. The chrome web browser provides a good experience, with rendering much faster than the playbook. Games play fluidly on the Tegra 3 powered machine, with the vibrant screen providing an almost SciFi feel in such a slim form factor.

The keyboard is good, certainly the best soft keyboard I’ve used. It is a little sluggish at times, with some key taps not registering as well as you would hope. Strangely tapping quickly seems to work better than trying for accuracy.

While the bundled Transformers movie is a terrible film, it does show off the tablet to good effect, with the movie streamed in HD, and looking very crisp on the high resolution screen. It also further justifies having an unlimited broadband package as the one film weighed in at over 5GB of streamed data. Uploading my own DVDs was fiddly from Linux, but should be straightforward from windows or Mac OS.

In conclusion, while the Nexus 7 may not be a substitute for a laptop in the way that an Asus Transformer could be, it makes a great content consumption device. If the alternative for content creation is your phone, the 7 inch screen works far better, while retaining a lot of portability that a large device sacrifices.

The killer feature for me is the weight. Holding the tablet for extended periods is as comfortable as holding a paperback book, possibly more so. The Nexus is the first device for which I reach for most online tasks, with the desktop relegated to development and photo editing.

Tags: android, tablets
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