I bought my Nexus 7 mainly so I could have a proper play with Android, beyond the few minutes at a time of playing with other peoples phones. I am an iPhone and iPad owner.

The Nexus 7 is a good tablet and Android Jellybean is a good OS. Neither the hardware or the software however are as good as what Apple provides, in my opinion.

The Nexus 7 is amazingly well built and specced for the price, you'd happily imagine it cost 50% more than it did. It is fast and Android is now largely lag free (it still isn't a smooth as iOS, but it is a lot closer). The screen is good, but obviously a long way short of the iPad.

Some of the stuff that you can do on Android that you can't on iOS is great, the top one for me being widgets on the home screens.

There are problems though. The quality of apps available just doesn't compare to the iOS world, even where there is an app to match the iOS one, the quality almost always isn't as good.

The other problem for me is web browsing on sites with tightly packed links and buttons. The combination of the Nexus/Android/Chrome is just no where near as good as working out what you meant to click on as iOS. This is a pain in the arse on some sites, bbs forums in particular.

Because of this inaccurancy I repeatedly lock posts accidentally on another forum I admin. It has tightly packed links at the top of the page and time and again it picks the wrong link when I click.

Chrome has a loupe feature, where in some cases it decides that there are too many tap targets in an area and so when you tap it pops up a magnified view for you to click on. But when this loupe appears is pretty much random. I can click on the same tightly packed links 10 times in a row and about 2 times the loupe will appear.

iOS in comparison has an almost magical ability to work out which link you were fumbling for.

This isn't a problem of screen size by the way, the sites I've had problems with render at about the same physical size on the Nexus as they do on the iPhone.

One final problems is font rendering. Font rendering on Android generally seems a bit hit and miss. The fonts in the supplied books app are truly awful. Fonts in other apps are often slightly blurry or poorly aliased.

Chrome has further problems with fonts. It has a very odd idea of picking font sizes, with seemingly a random element thrown in ! You can be browsing a series of posts in a forum thread where the font size it picks for the body seems to change for every post

So in summary, good for the price. But if you can afford it and don't need the extra portability, get an iPad.

Though that said, Android does still have some fundamentally crappy stuff in it. The handling of indicating the end of lists being one of the most obvious.

Now I understand that they had to stop using rubber banding, because of Apple's patents. And the approach of the glow that they show instead could work ok (though will never feel as natural as the rubber banding), except that:

- some lists don't bother with the glow at all
- the glow isn't that visible even on the black theme
- the glow is all but in invisible on many lists in many apps (including Google's own apps/widgets)
- it rarely seems to be used at the top of lists
- IT DOESN'T OCCUR AT ALL IN CHROME* (there is never any indication that you have reached the end of a list or a page, it just stops dead)

* Chrome is my normal browser on Windows/OSX by the way, I love Chrome on the desktop

It does. This would be at least a $399 tablet at retail for anyone else. The value aspect is always going to be first and foremost when the people selling it are willing to do so in exchange for zero or negative income. Google is losing big bucks on this one when you factor in costs besides manufacturing.

As good as it is, I see a lot of hesitation in many reviews, including Andy's and Roger's. If this were selling for $400 I'm not sure that folks would be so restrained nor forgiving. It will be interesting to see what happens if Apple starts selling something near $200. I wonder if reviewers will be as forgiving because of the price.

You make a good point on the price, though it wouldn't be 50% more expensive if Google were trying to sell it for the normal market rate, just an extra 25-30% would do it I reckon. People at this end of the market don't have Apple sized profit margins remember

But that doesn't change the fact that the hardware is good and Android 4.1 is good to use. Note, in neither case did I say great. To me the iPad 3 is a great tablet and iOS is great to use.

The Nexus would be good (but not great) even if it did cost 50% more. And even if the Nexus did sell for 50% more the iPad 3 would still cost 66% more (in the UK at least).

I can't speak for others, but if I'd paid $400, I'd probably feel exactly the same as I do now. It's good (maybe not $400 good -- if I had that much money to play with I'd be looking at the larger tablets); I'm just not really a tablet person. I grabbed one because I thought I might cobble together some Android apps in my copious free time and, well, £200...

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: it could be epic, and I'd still be saying "meh".

That said, if I had $400, I still wouldn't buy the iPad, because -- basically -- I hate Apple.

And once more, where are your numbers on this one? From what I've read/heard, the device costs something like $150-170 to make. Assuming that the rest of the cost goes to Asus for their profits, it's just selling for cost.

Well, I say that, but neither of us really knows, do we? I'm just presuming that Google doesn't have a ton of cost sunk into each tablet. They don't have the huge advertising campaigns, for example.

DealExtreme is littered with 7" tablets for under $200. Not quite the Nexus 7, but it does give an indicator of true manufacturing costs + a small markup.

Heck, some of them are even under $100 and have ICS installed.

This is almost the entire reason why I got my first iPod touch. I was impressed with how seamless the web browsing experience was, because it was so good at working out which link I meant to click on.

I wonder how much of that is the OS software, versus how much of that is the resolution and sensitivity of the touchscreen?

The Nexus 7 has a much higher resolution screen than any of those, though, and that's likely to be a very significant cost.

There's a 16GB one there with a 720p IPS screen for $215.

It has more accessories included, as well as a micro-SD card slot, and that price includes shipping, but no GPS.

Again, not a Nexus 7, but it does give an indication of the manufacturing costs.

Hell, some of them might actually work when they arrive

(sorry, far to scarred by my DealExtreme disappointments to let that go unsaid)

Some of it is definitely clever software. I often end up tapping closer to the link I didn't want than I do to the link I did want on the web forum that was causing the Nexus so much trouble. Yet still in most cases Safari manages to pick the right link. I can only assume that it has some sort of heuristics with a memory that knows that I regularly click on the link to return to the forum index and rarely click on the link to lock or split topics.

Either that or there really are pixies in Apple's iOS devices

Whatever it is, the Nexus/Android/Chrome combination is missing that bit of magic. It is probably my biggest issue with the Nexus at the moment.

So it's a bug (selects the wrong link), but a happy bug (aka. "feature").

No, very much not a bug. It selects the right link, from a users point of view.

(I've never consciously noted any cases of this bit of magic* causing false positives)

* I freely admit by the way that I could be imagining the whole thing...

Yeah, but it's a 10" tablet. Not that there's anything wrong with a 10" tablet, but screens with higher pixel density are significantly more costly.

I'll keep my review short. I've only had the Nexus 7 since July 17th, but it has already caused me to wipe my iPad 2 and prep it for sale on eBay.

Pros: I like the size of the Nexus 7. For most of my uses (video on airplanes and news reading), this form factor makes more sense and is more portable. The battery life is at least as good as my iPad 2. The screen is superior to the iPad 2. Chrome on the Nexus 7 can keep more tabs in memory than Safari on iPad 2.

Cons: The home screen with stock launcher doesn't rotate to landscape view. The available accessories look terrible at this time. Only 16GB max memory onboard. I would have ordered at least 64GB if available.

If anyone comes across a Nexus 7 case similar to the official iPad 1 (preferred) or iPad 2 (acceptable) ones, please post it here. There are some that are close, but they're clearly adapted from some other similarly-sized tablet. Lots of them have a loop for a stylus, FFS.

I'm still debating if I'm going to pick one up to see where Android is at now. Still not likely to actually switch ecosystems/platforms, but I may find some use for it.

Andy's info here has been useful, along with the reviews from a few sources. If I were to switch, the 16GB upper limit at $249 would be a dealbreaker. But as a toy to play with, I'll probably just go with the 8GB $199 option.

Yeah, the Home screens on my GN don't rotate either. I believe the reason is that the owner (you) gets to place things on it the way you like, and auto-rotate might muck that up.

Dunno. The apps (mostly) all auto-rotate very well though.

If you plug an MHL adapter into the Galaxy Nexus, it will rotate the screen and keep everything in-place.

Third party launchers usually allow you to rotate the screen, but I can't say for certain if a stock launcher since 1.6 on the G1 ever did.

Most Android tablets up to this point seem to prefer landscape orientation. The inability for the Nexus 7 to operate like that is just a little strange to me. Not a deal-breaker.

EDIT: Here's a youtube video showing the Galaxy Nexus over MHL. You can see that the Nexus is just mirroring what's shown on the monitor.

In general, no, but a friend has a first-gen Moto Droid (Milestone), and when you slide out the landscape keyboard, it does rotate the launcher to landscape. That's the only time I've ever seen the stock launcher rotate, though.

I'm using Zeam Launcher now, but I ended up disabling the rotation. It just doesn't help much and made me occasionally miss an icon while it was rotating.

Do we know yet whether the MHL adapter will work on the 7? There was some weird statement from someone that said MHL support wasn't available in 4.x yet, which is clearly nonsense if the Galaxy Nexus supports it, unless it's something special that Samsung put in there.

Does anyone with a 7 have a MHL adapter to try out?

You're completely correct, Bitt. I had the G1 and it did the same thing.


I also dislike it. I use a replacement launcher (switched from Zeam to Apex Pro) and don't want the home screen to rotate.

.. and the March of the Penguins continues: Samsung Doubles Apple's Marketshare.

That's just one (biggest by far) vendor of Android smartphones.
Let's just hope Samsung doesn't reduce Jobs-less Apple completely down to "marginal status" in 5 years time -- competition here is great and needed.

Cheers

If anyone reading this thread is now frothing at the mouth for a Galaxy Nexus, I'm going to be selling mine. I will give anyone on this board a fair deal before I post to ebay later today, so let me know.

My Nexus is an original Yakju model from the UK launch-day and is currently running 4.1.1 (Jelly Bean). It's in pristine condition, has never been dropped, and I have a couple spare (third-party) batteries in addition to the OEM unit.

Nothing is wrong with the Nexus. I've been using my Galaxy S II with CM9 on it the past few days. It makes no sense to have two Android super-phones around, so the Nexus is getting the boot because it's easier to sell.

Thanks.

Mark, I have a lovely bridge for sale with original Samsung rivets - anyone interested?

Do you know what Apple doesn't do, and has never done? Channel stuffing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_stuffing

Let's revisit these numbers in three months and then again three months after that.

Another item of note... Apple's figures are official, announced in an earnings report/call that's governed by SEC reporting rules. Samsung's numbers are strictly out of thin air by IDC and as best as I can tell, based on nothing. In the US alone, for the umpteenth quarter in a row, every major service provider sold more iPhones than other brands - again, official numbers reported by each respective carrier. It's hard to imagine considering the iPhone costs more, sometimes much more.

Must be that time of the year to trot out 3 month battle victories when one side is in a lull and declare the full war nearly over.

For those who don't trust a single survey source (IDC), then Gartner's most recent numbers show something similar. As do numbers from Strategy Analytics.

The scary statistic, is that the numbers show nearly 1 million new Android users every day, not including tablets.

Gotta come up with some app ideas now!

Those are all quarterly snapshots though, representing 3 month windows of (usually) how many phones Samsung and others shipped to a store. They don't accurately represent how many end users have access to an app you might write. Especially with the fragmented nature of the Android platform.

I'm all for competition too, and find it great Android is as strong as it is to provide viable alternatives in the market. I just don't see any signs Android is going to marginalize iOS during the next 5 years, as it hasn't done so over the past 5 years.

When you look at the same firms reporting US numbers you will see how far off they can be from real numbers that you and I have access to. Then that leads me to believe that their margin of error globally must at least be similar.

Google reports Android activation numbers all the time and I have yet to see how the numbers they mention are possible, given the updated stats of all Android products. ie. you can multiply out their activations and the numbers never fit with the total number of devices they also report.

It's entirely possible Samsung has sold 50m smart phones, but high improbable, if for no other reason that shipping a product into the channel doesn't mean it's actually sold. However many phones Samsung has out there in the channel now, they better hope that inventory gets to consumers soon. Because come September there's going to be a big reason for retailers and distributors to start returning product.

The Gartner numbers are for end-users, not channels.