At The Verge, Joshua Topolsky offers a positive write-up of Google's new 7-inch tablet. Aimed more at Kindle's Fire than Apple's iPad, the $200 Nexus 7 nevertheless feels more like the latter than the former: "Google’s Nexus 7 isn’t just an excellent tablet for $200. It’s an excellent tablet, period. In fact, it’s the first Android tablet that I can confidently recommend to buyers."

  • http://twitter.com/metal_max Max Allan

    I’m waiting for a review of the Nexus Q that explains why anyone would buy one. 
    It looks cool, which makes me want one, but seems to be a bit naff and very expensive, which makes me not want it.
    As far as I’ve been able to tell so far, it only plays content from the Google Play store. So, having bought albums years ago, then gone to CDs, then MP3/iTunes I now have yet another way I can buy my media, again. A big win for record companies I’m sure, but I’ll just stick with the Popcorn hour at half the price and twice the functionality.

    • TheKaz1969

      you can easily import your iTunes library into Google Music and even have it add to Google Music when you purchase from iTunes. It appears it streams from the Google Music app, not from the Play store.
      As for the price v. functionality, I am guessing this may be a hub for additional  future functionality. But, without know what it will become, I’m not willing to plunk down $300 for it now.

      • http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

        The review says $199… it’s only a hundred bucks difference, but $199 makes it worth checking out, to me.

        • TheKaz1969

          Tablet is $199. Q is $299.

          • http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

            Ah. Though I like Dr. Who, I’m not ready to become an Ood by carrying around one of those.

            Reading further in the tablet review, no microSD slot seems limiting.

      • fuzzyfuzzyfungus

        The issue that I find baffling is that (with the exception of a 25w amp of unknown characteristics that will only be relevant if you don’t already have something to drive your speakers), the $300 Nexus Q appears to have absolutely no advantages over any of a number of cheaper Android devices that also have audio and HDMI outs; but also have screens, don’t require a second device for remote control, etc, etc.

        Given that a capacitive touchscreen of reasonable non-awfulness is one of the most expensive items on the BOM for a tablet or smartphone, it just seems inscrutable that a device that is essentially spec-identical with a midrange phone/tablet, minus the screen and any cell-modem hardware, and presently with considerable software limitations, should sell for more than a full device…

        If it’s just a crippled streamer, Roku can do that for $50 by shipping much less hardware. If it’s a full android device, why is it totally useless without a second android device to remote control it(even if connected to a TV, no provision for any control peripherals…)?

      • http://twitter.com/muddi900 muddi900

         It contains a built-in pre-amp. Hence the price

        • dnebdal

          That and being manufactured in the US, I guess.

        • fuzzyfuzzyfungus

          The amp certainly isn’t a bad thing; but it seems like a feature with a very awkward ‘fit’.

          Your high-fidelity users probably don’t want to be streaming MP3s in any case, and even if they do they probably have an amp/receiver of their choice to which audio can be losslessly shoved by TOSLINK or HDMI.

          People who don’t much care likely have either their TV’s speakers(in the video/HDMI connectivity use case) or some powered PC speaker/MP3 player dock/etc that provides both the speakers and the amp and just wants something resembling line-level analog input. While most of them kind of suck, they are absolutely ubiquitous and don’t seem to offend people that much, and most are under $100, often well under. Since these are generally designed to work with either computers or MP3 players already, they are dead simple for even the least clueful to just shove into the headphone jack of just about any tablet or phone and away you go.

          I just don’t know where the customer is who is too picky for PC speakers, and wants a classy set of unpowered bookshelf types; but is sufficiently non-picky that they don’t have a discrete amp of choice(and, since Class D kit amps, of varying levels of completedness and quality, start at about $20, they also have to be sufficiently convenience-oriented, or allergic to extra boxes, that they don’t opt for a discrete amp on economic grounds).

    • Jubilex

       Well it’s android – other than having a fixed amount of storage you can transfer your files to it via usb and play just about any format you can come up with and it will work – as long as it’s not drm’d.

      • scatterfingers

        Or you can connect via SMB to your network store, which I do with my phone and tablet. That’s a nice feature, especially when you’ve got 16tb of storage in the basement.

    • Jaron Hendrix

      You can upload your existing MP3s to the Google Play Music cloud at no cost, from whence they should be streamable just like anything else on your account.

    • Mike Croft

      My understanding is that you select the song you want to play from your music library and the Q will just stream the song from Google Music, so you won’t actually be buying through it.

      Unfortunately, it seems that that also makes it limited to the US, which is a shame since it does seem very “hackable” (especially since they said they designed it with that in mind.) I was surprised that Google didn’t announce an SDK or Android SDK plugin to target the Q for companies like Netflix to make Q-compatible apps.

      I just hope the Q isn’t a one-off and gets developed by Google as well as third parties. It has huge potential as a concept.

      • http://twitter.com/tom_hiles Tom Hiles

        It’s a cinch to register for Google Music outside the US – once you’re registered, you can download the client and get uploading and using the Android client (and presumably the Q) without any problems: 
        http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/19/how-to-use-google-music-from-anywhere-yes-outside-of-the-unit/ This worked for me (in the UK) about 6 months ago… 

      • Jubilex

         That’s only if you want to stream music – which of course you could use spotify or pandora or anything else really – you can still *load* your mp3′s to the device – and if you don’t like the stock player app you can always use any of the dozens of others.

  • http://www.unwesen.de/ unwesen

    If only I had a use for 7″ tablet, then I might be inclined to believe that. Unfortunately, my phone screen is about that size, so in order to qualify as a “tablet”, a device has to be closer to A4 in size.

    • bryan_larsen

       Remember that area is square, so a 7″ tablet is twice as big as a 5″ phone and 3 times as big as a 4″ phone.

      7″ is also approximately the size of the printed area in a hardcover novel, so obviously ideally suited for some forms of consumption.

      Even non-fiction PDF’s with graphs etc might work well on the 7″ tablet because the screen has a fairly high resolution and the whitespace surrounding the content can be trimmed.  Reflowable PDF has no problem, of course.

      For me the big win for the 7″ size is that it can be held like a phone — one handed.   10″ is just to big and heavy, requiring two hands for extended and limiting the times and places it can be used.

      • http://www.unwesen.de/ unwesen

        Yeah, but for the use cases you mention I have an eInk Kindle, which is infinitely nicer to read from. I’ll use that for serious reading. I’ll use my phone for anything quick on the go.

        My use-case for a tablet is effectively to have as close to an A4 area that’s “interactive paper”. That is, it doesn’t have to read like paper (though that would be nice), but I have to be able to use it like paper (scribble on it, fill in forms, write text, etc.).

        Nobody has quite delivered on that yet, and in the meantime, a 10″ tablet is an as ok an approximation as I’ll be able to get. Ideally I’d like an A4 colour eInk device that’s fast enough for film/games/animation. In a few years, maybe.

    • scatterfingers

      I hate the form factor of the iPad and other tablets that size, but absolutely adore the size of my Kindle 2, so I think this is right up my alley.

  • http://twitter.com/brianabolic Brian Howard

    Build one with at least 100 Gigs of internal storage and I’m there. This ‘cloud’ trend has got to stop.

    • Jason Baker

      The data control freak in me says “I agree” but the realist in my says “good luck with that.”

    • scatterfingers

      This thing is wifi only, so presumably you’re going to be connecting at your house, where you probably have some sort of storage somewhere… so you could do that.

      But eve 100gb isn’t much. That’s a couple TV series, or 50 HD movies. Why not get really aggressive and go for 500gb or 1tb?

      • http://twitter.com/tom_hiles Tom Hiles

        Because virtually nobody would pay for a tablet at the price that 500 gb of flash memory would add. A 512gb MacBook Air is $500 more than the 256gb model. Going from 16gb to 512gb would be a much greater cost. Nobody is going to buy a $1000 tablet. 
        Are there even any professional-market laptops with 1tb flash? 

        • Jubilex

          That’s because building the flash into the device takes up real estate – and fixed costs involving purchasing a set amount of chips at a certain price – etc.  Why care about any of that if you can just add an *SD* slot to the thing and let storage increase as prices fall.

          I love the specs on this tablet – but I can’t fathom why they’d leave off an SD slot for expandability.

          • http://twitter.com/tom_hiles Tom Hiles

            Kinda irrelevant to the original question while SD cards of the size scatterfingers is talking about are either unavailable or as expensive as built-in memory.

  • http://twitter.com/muddi900 muddi900

    AnandTech seems to prefer Asus’ self-branded flagship, Transformer Pad Infinity!

    • TheKaz1969

      The Transformer Infinity could perhaps be a better tablet,  but it is also up to 3 times as expensive. Keep in mind that this review didn’t say it was the best android tablet, just the first they would recommend someone buying (which likely means price also factors into the equation).

  • http://www.pobox.com/~rknop Rob Knop

    It remains to be seen if the corrupt US patent system will allow this tablet to be sold in the US, or if Apple’s monopolistic ambitious are going to be supported by the US government’s legal branch.

  • teapot

    This tablet is going to rock. Unless Apple seriously drops the price of the ipad in response I will be buying one of these when they come out. My biggest gripe comes with the neglect of a microSD slot (c’mon google, you’re not apple. I expect better!) and non-removable battery. This is a big sell for me because a battery is going to be the first point of weakness on any device that is well taken care of. This is specifically the reason I dislike apple products. I never wanna have to go to the douchebag bar and talk to some genie ass.

    This is the first tablet that was designed by google from the ground up which is why I trust it. I used to have a SGS1… roughtly the same specs as the Nexus S (which I replaced it with), but the Nexus S is leaps and bounds better than the SGS in terms of performance and UX. Google know how to design hardware to play nice with their software. Other manufacturers think they know better and end up loading their devices with masses of intolerable bloatware.