Review: Google Nexus 7 -The best Android tablet at the moment

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Now while the Apple iPad is the undisputed king as far as higher end tablets go, we have yet to see a budget Android tablet that is worth that title. Google has come out with theNexus 7 made by ASUS as its maiden Jelly Bean (Android 4.1) sporting 7-inch tablet. As of now it’s the only official Android 4.1 tablet on the market. So does the crown for the 7-inch tablets finally have a taker?

The Nexus 7 is powered by the NVIDIA Tegra 3 system-on-chip which has a quad-core-processor running at 1.3GHz. It only comes in a Wi-Fi model no 3G.

Coming in the 7-inch form-factor, the Google Nexus 7 fits quite well in the palm of your hand. The textured rubber/leather covering on the rear side, does give you that much needed grip that is lacking in many brush metal finished tablets. At 10.4 mm thickness, the Nexus 7 is one millimetre thicker than the new Apple iPad, but the edges around the Nexus are nicely bevelled out.

The Nexus 7 has a backlit IPS panel and has a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. Not quite the retina display, but the Nexus 7 packs in respectable 216 pixels per inch. It sports a 1.2 MP front camera and lacks a rear camera. Thanks to the IPS panel, the viewing angles on the Nexus 7 are fabulous, but the screen is quite reflective. Jelly Bean features Project Butter, which was meant to improve the responsiveness of the tablet. It basically makes the CPU and GPU run in parallel which gives a shot in the arm to the responsiveness of the tablet. Transitions are happening at a spiffy 60 frames per second. Jelly Bean allows you to resize your widgets. Also when you place your widgets on the homescreen which has already some apps, those apps will automatically rearrange themselves to fit in the widgets.

Google Now is a nifty addition to Google search. It offers contextual search based on your location. It throws up cards having the relevant information based on your location. There are various category of cards for weather, public transport, traffic, sports and so on. Getting completely used to Google Now will take a learning curve. It progressively gets better the more you use Google search.

Notifications have undergone a sea-change. Not only do you get much more details in your notifications, but you can directly go to the app where the next action regarding the notification needs to be taken, by tapping on that particular notification. Offline maps was one feature that has finally come on Google devices, but you have a limitation as to the area you can download – around 83 MB worth of maps can be downloaded at a time. It also supports Near-Field Communication (NFC) but due to obvious reasons it’s really not that useful at the moment. But from future –proofing perspective it’s a nice addition.

With respect to performance, it is certainly less powerful than the new iPad, but that is expected. It performed at par with the ASUS Transformer Prime among the Android tablets, whereas beat most of the budget Android tablets that have been flooding the Indian market off-late.

It excels at multi-tasking. I did not notice any slowing down of the device despite opening around 10 apps, downloading stuff in the background, buffering video in YouTube and so on. NVIDIA Tegra 3 also ensures that you have a wonderful experience with graphics. Playing Dead Trigger was a lot of fun. The game ran smoothly without any sort of lag. With audio at higher volumes I noticed a distortion in the sound output. I was  able to over-come this issue by adjusting the equalizer settings.

The 4325 mAh battery can easily withstand 7-8 hours of regular usage.

FINAL VERDICT

If you want to get the best Android experience on a tablet, look no further than the Nexus 7, at the moment.