Google Nexus 7 – Eat the Jelly Bean

I could well endanger my Gadgeteer merit badge here….. 🙂

There’s two things that appeal to me about the Nexus 7: Quad Core Processor and Price

I’m hoping though that we’re not getting into a Microsoft style upgrade here where we need better hardware just to support the operating system. Jelly Bean looks nice however perhaps I’m becoming a bit blaise about the whole thing, but there’s nothing that revolutionary about it (nor Honeycomb). A lot of the functionality being built into the OS are things that I’ve had on Gingerbread using third party apps for a while. That’s the nice thing about Android being so open, people can find shortfalls in the OS and address them easily and cheaply.

For a lot of the stuff I do, the Quad Core Processor is not going to make that much difference in performance.

Just like the Amazon Fire, Google is using the old Gillette razor and blade model; sell the unit cheap and make your money on the sale of apps/movies/books. The price point they’ve set will certainly given the Amazon Fire a run for it’s money and will also increase the market share for Google.

I really like the 7″ form factor. It’s a nice compromise between useability and weight/size (my first tablet was the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7″), and the screen will look nice with the high resolution. It’ll even fit into your back jeans pocket if push comes to shove.

The fact that the unit has no external storage threw me initially, but if I really sit back and think about it, in everyday use is that really an issue? I’ve got over 1TB of online storage via various providers and heaps more than that in local storage. Transfer,storage and streaming of data isn’t that big an issue these days. The Cloud is the new floppy disk 🙂 The issue comes where you need offline storage only, something that probably isn’t going to affect a lot of people where they’ll be using their Nexus.

Another thing that I found strange on first read of the specs was that they didn’t include an external display port so that you can share your Google movies/TV on your big screen, but on reflection that’s obviously where the Nexus Q comes into play.

While I won’t be buying one, this can only be a good thing for the consumer. Google will sell a butt load of these but to me it’s a niche product for first time tablet users, those who want a cheap Android device and those who are willing to mainly consume from the “Googleverse”.

For those who are “more advanced” Android users I’m guessing that Google’s strategy is to set a standard for hardware manufacturers. Every review of a new Jelly Bean device will find itself compared to the $199 Nexus 7. Hardware manufacturers will have been set a very high standard for both performance and price and need to have innovations that can draw consumers away from the budget Nexus. That being said I’m not expecting to see 10″ tablets with quad core and 3G and SD slots and active digitisers at the same price point 🙂

In the end, as always it comes down to your particular usage as to whether this will be a good unit for you. Standard disclaimer: YMMV 🙂