Gadgetory

hey this is Josh from the verge and we're taking a look at the Google Nexus 7 tablet it's an Asus made 7-inch $200 device that is being sold exclusively right now through Google's Play Store and it's meant to basically be the content consumption tablet device that Google helps will lure people away from things like the Kindle Fire and maybe even the iPad at least the lower end iPad 2 it's got a Tegra 3 chipset inside with a gig of ram 8 or 16 gigabytes storage options Wi-Fi bluetooth accelerometer gyroscope GPS it has a 1.2 megapixel camera on the front and it's also got a pretty decent looking display it's a 1280 by 800 resolution IPS display and I have to say the viewing angles are quite good and the text and color reproduction is is nice as well all in all it is a pretty nice device for 200 bucks the hardware feels really well-made it's not too plasticky not that cheap feeling it's got a cool rubbery soft touch back that is kind of feels like leather it's almost like a cross between leather and rubber in your hands but it's got a good feeling it doesn't smudge up too badly and it generally feels like a nice weight and thickness in your hands and and frankly I like the 7 inch form factor I feel like it's a really comfortable size for a tablet in some ways it's a lot more comfortable than the iPad especially for things like reading books or magazines and even in doing things like watching movies on a plane the tablet runs jellybean which is the newest version of Android that's Android 4.1 it's the successor to Ice Cream Sandwich and there aren't a ton of huge new things in jellybean but they've refined a lot of what was going on in Ice Cream Sandwich there are some minor graphic changes noting that most users will notice from one version to the other they've done something that they call project butter to make scrolling smoother and more consistent on the device and scrolling definitely feels smooth and consistent on on the Nexus 7 though there have been times when I'm scrolling quickly through a list and it it kind of snaps back from my scrolling it's not doing it right now just did it right there it happens very rarely I think it's because of the increased sensitivity it's not something most users are gonna notice we bothered by but it is something that I took note of app drawer in which a drawer exactly like what we saw in Ice Cream Sandwich but there have been significant changes in other places in particular notifications are way upgraded they're using a different font it's they're a little bit clearer a little bit cleaner and some notifications can be expanded and you can actually take action on them for instance you can share an image right from your device to Google+ or other services right from the notification without having to go into the app it's a really cool useful new feature of jellybean but sometimes you want your notifications to just be collapsed and you actually need to use a two-finger swipe to collapse them so it would be great if there was an option to say keep all of my notifications collapsed unless I otherwise specify but they have not included that here google has also made a really big change to the way it's doing search on jellybean and this goes across all of its devices that will get jellybean first off its got a almost Siri like voice search functionality now that is a lot smarter about finding the kinds of things that you need to find let's give it a whirl here sushi restaurants near me so not only pulls up a sushi restaurant nearby but it also gives me directions to that restaurant and it's actually got this little countdown timer if you don't take any action on that item it'll jump you right into directions and here you can actually see a taste of the new maps it has these nice tablet centric overlays which are really helpful but the new search service which Google is calling Google now isn't about just competing with Siri in fact it does a lot of stuff that Siri doesn't do and can't do in some ways it predicts what you're going to do and will give you notifications about that stuff so for instance if you commute every day it will know when your commute is happening and will tell you if when you get on your commute there are problems on the road it'll reroute you and give you different directions to get around that issue it will also tell you if you're waiting for a train for instance that the train has been delayed or when the train is coming it will tell you whether when you get to a new area and if you're looking at a flight for instance I booked a flight I'm leaving tonight on a red-eye let's take a quick look at that Virgin America to New York flight 30 Virgin America 30 from San Francisco to New York is on time and departs in seven hours 54 minutes Google says the service learns your habits over time it's obviously using your search data to compile some of this information so to me this is a really kind of a long-term test you don't get the sense of what its gonna do in one or two days and for me especially since I'm not at home and not going through my standard routine right now I'm not getting an impression of what it'll be like to live with so I think we're gonna have more on Google now as time goes on but it's a very intriguing very interesting service and it's worth noting that the voice recognition and the voice response in Google now is really impressive I mean it sounds better than Siri and it doesn't match series functionality one-to-one but it definitely gets close in a lot of areas and I'm actually really impressed with it Google obviously sees the Nexus 7 as a content consumption device and they've beefed up some of their play offerings in accordance with that they've added play magazines so you can now download magazine content it works pretty well although I have to say the selection isn't quite up to snuff for me they don't have Us Weekly which I took as a real problem and you see here that it actually does some rendering which when you're flipping through pages quickly it can sometimes take a little while to render but the offering is very similar to what the Nook does and very similar to what the Fire doesn't in fact you can go into a mode here where you could just read the text of an article or a section as you would maybe an e-book which makes it a bit easier to take in some of this content I will say though in general the performance in the magazine app feels a lot snappier than both the fire and the Nook in terms of a one to one comparison I'd say the Nexus 7 is definitely superior to either of those options google has also added TV offerings to its video selection so you can now download or stream an episode of a TV show or an entire season they've got a new interface for the play app which is a little bit easier to navigate here's an episode of falling skies I've been meaning to watch this show and the HD playback on the Nexus 7 looks really good I actually had to download this episode because I was trying to stream it over an LTE connection here in the room and streaming HD did not work out that well for me we actually had some issues with streaming on the queue as well and I don't know if if Google is having trouble with streaming HD content which would be odd since they make YouTube but we definitely seen a few issues here and there so I would recommend if you're planning on taking this thing on the road and you're planning on tethering that you download the content you want at home before you get going so one of the things that still a persistent issue for Google tablets though is a little less pronounced on this device is the fact that there really aren't a lot of tablet apps for Android right now and I mean apps that are truly customized for a tablet experience you've got some that actually seem okay something like pocket for instance feels like it's been customized for a tablet but I did notice some weird errors for instance when I change orientation it is not reformatting the way you would expect it to for a tablet experience in general though it does have a pretty good experience but then you've got other apps like Twitter that are clearly still just for phones what I will say is that between a 4.7 inch Galaxy Nexus and a 7-inch Nexus 7 the difference is not that huge and in fact Twitter is a pretty passable experience on a 7-inch display however when you look at it compared to the iPad Twitter experience there's no competition the iPad blows it out of the water that said there are some great tablet experiences here in particular Google+ as a tablet experience is excellent and you can see that that google has really put a lot of time and love into making this pleasurable experience there are also some great games like shadow gun for instance that look fantastic and play really well on the Nexus 7 we've tested it for a bunch of different devices but I have to say it looks really great on the Nexus 7 and because it's been optimized for Tegra you see a lot of graphic detail that you're not going to nann Tegra devices so one of the other great new aspects of jellybean is that chrome is now the standard browser it's out of beta and as you might expect the experience is really pretty good scrolling is decent I did notice a little bit of hiccuping particularly on the verge though we have quite a heavy site and general performance is really fast and snappy and sites loaded pretty quickly take a look at the New York Times here everybody's favorite site to visit and I mean you can see here oh that's cute a nexus 7 ad but you can see here that it loads really well scrolling works well and text renders really nicely and really quickly Chrome on the Nexus 7 is really great because it actually feels even closer to the desktop experience you get a proper tab bar and it just works really well it feels really natural and it's a huge improvement they've just released Chrome for iOS and we'll have to see side-by-side which one is the better performer but my guess is that you've got a much more customized experience on something like the Nexus 7 or the Galaxy Nexus in all the Nexus 7 is an incredible tablet for this price point and in fact it's a pretty incredible tablet for any price point the hardware is really nice it feels good in your hand the screen looks good apps perform a really snappy way and jellybean is a really good operating system I mean Android has truly come into its own from a design standpoint and from a usability standpoint I think it's a really enjoyable experience if I had to recommend what $200 tablet you should buy I honestly would say the Nexus 7 right now I mean this isn't just a competitor to the fire this is a full-featured tablet with a great version of Android on it and I think huge possibility if developers really start looking at Google tablets and saying we want to do something with this platform but for the price of the hardware you get this is a fantastic tablet