Gadgetory

this is David with the verge and this is Google's new Nexus 7 last year at Google's first Nexus 7 immediately became the best Android tablet on the market but in the last 12 months it's become plotting ly slow and buggy and just outdated so Google's back with another this time for 229 dollars bringing the device way up to date it starts with the hardware made by asus the new Nexus 7 has a 7.0 2 inch 1920 by 1200 IPS display that is way better than the last model or even something like the iPad Mini it has fantastic viewing angles and gorgeous color reproduction and it's just insanely sharp at 323 pixels per inch it's good enough that you can even read tiny text I could actually read a book through the screenshots in the Play Store and everything from movies to books is just more pleasant to look at the screen gets incredibly bright and absolutely destroys the battery when it's turned all the way up but it's overall one of the best tablet displays I've ever seen maybe be best even while improving the screen Google managed to make the Nexus 7 a little bit thinner and a lot lighter it's a little taller now and it feels a lot taller the bezels on the sides are thinner in the last year's model but the top and bottom bezels are still big and fat it makes the device feel kind of asymmetrical which the office in our camera lens on the front doesn't help either but the Nexus 7 is even more comfortable and usable in one hand than ever it's still soft touch and comfortable but it feels much more grown-up somehow I could see James Bond using this Nexus 7 Google and Asus also added stereo speakers which are great no matter how you hold the new Nexus 7 you get genuine stereo sound that's pretty loud and pretty clear there's a new five megapixel rear camera as well but it's not very good or very interesting for $229 you can only expect so much but Google did make bigger promises this time the new Nexus 7 runs on a faster processor and a GPU that Google says is more than four times as powerful there's double the RAM now too which is a big upgrade and it's fast other than the fact that Google has somehow not figured out how to animate scrolling properly there are basically zero performance issues with this Nexus 7 games look great even intensive ones and the operating system flows smoothly part of that is definitely due to the fact that the Nexus 7 runs Android 4.3 it's still called jelly bean but it does bring a few new things to the table restricted profiles basically just gives you parental controls for the tablet you can pick and choose which apps certain users can access it's a future lots of tablets have had though it's just now baked into the OS one genuinely cool new feature is Play games which is essentially a not hideous game center or Xbox Live for Andrew it tracks your achievements and high scores shows you what your friends are playing and so on Google's talking a lot about tablet apps and how many of them look good and work well on the Nexus 7 there are definitely signs of life for the Android ecosystem here apps like Flipboard and Evernote and pocket work great on a 7-inch device and Netflix can now play in gorgeous 1080p but there are still plenty of examples like RDO which is just a blown up phone app and looks pretty bad particularly for game players - there are just many more great apps on iOS than on Android but for most things androids caught up and on a 7-inch device even the blown up phone apps don't look quite so terrible the new Nexus 7 is far more powerful than the old there's no question about that but I'm still a little nervous in our benchmark tests its raw numbers are much better but relative to the competition they're about the same as the Nexus 7 was a year ago I was hoping for insane crazy power so this tablet would be able to hang around for years but that may not be the case I guess we might just be stuck paying $229 a year forever which does make the more expensive models like the 32 gig model for $269 or 32 gigs plus LTE for 349 dollars a much harder sell better life is another thing that was odd about the old Nexus 7 at least the one I bought it was great for a couple of months and then basically fell off a cliff for now the new model easily lasts through a full day of pretty heavy use even with some gaming and movie watching and it burns almost no battery on standby which was not true of the Nexus 7 I bought a year ago I'm hoping that holds up so yes I'm still a little worried about the future but in some sense such as the price of progress and the Nexus 7 has such good build quality such a gorgeous screen and finally such a good selection of tablet apps that for as long as the processor can hang around this is going to be one of the best Android tablets on the market Apple may well come out with an iPad Mini with Retina display and it may well continue to have a big ecosystem advantage especially for gamers but if you want a tablet that's great for reading watching movies browsing the web and checking your email the new Nexus 7 for all of $229 is pretty much unbeatable you