I picked up a Nexus 7 last night, and it's a cool little device but I don't consider it a replacement for my iPad. There are a couple apps that interface to a device connect to a serial port over bluetooth I'm interested in using, and iOS really doesn't have anything comparable (I'm told part of it has to do with bluetooth licensing on iOS, but take that with a grain of salt.
I love the portability of the thing; I can throw it in a jacket pocket with no problem and I feel like I could actually take it with me without thinking about ti too much. My iPad lives in a messenger bag I bring back and forth to work, but it isn't something I'd consider grabbing on my way to dinner or to get a haircut or anything (even if I know I'm going to be waiting).
On the other hand, the screen does seem painfully small at times. If the keyboard is up you loose about half your display, and that bugs me a lot when trying to post anything in the web browser. I really like Safari's screen usage better when browsing, even on my iPhone. I'm not sure if it's more the physical size of the display or the way it's used, but it's possible a 7-inch iPad would have similar issues.
The build quality isn't bad for a $200 device. It fits well in your hand, and feel pretty solid. That said, it really doesn't compare to my iPad or iPhone. It's built well enough that it doesn't feel cheap, but it's not something that you would pick up and be impressed with if you had no clue what it cost. It's a good value, but not really good (if that makes any sense).
The color reproduction on the screen is pretty bad. This is a personal nitpick of mine since I really concentrate on color matching (all my monitors all calibrated, etc). My wife noticed it in passing with the blue on the Facebook page, though, and she can't tell a difference between my calibrated setups and her Dell laptop (which I have sworn not to touch). Everything kind of has a washed-out look, which is a shame because the display panel itself should be excellent based on the specs. There seems to be a lot of hope that it's a display calibration issue and can be fixed with a software update, but for now it's kind of a downer.
For basic tasks it's nice and snappy. I've only been playing with it for around a day, but I can't say I've encountered anything yet that made me think I needed a faster device. I don't use a lot of third-party apps though, so it may just be that Jelly Bean has seen a dramatic improvement (which it sounds like they were trying for).
I'm still kind of put off by a lot of the Android interface elements, though. Although the soft-keys at the bottom create a kind of sleek look with no buttons on the surface I'm not sure I'm sold on it. The home button double-press has always seemed silly to me, but I'm not sure the Android alternative is much better. I do really like the webOS-inspired app switching (well, closing more than switching), though. I knew there would be a learning curve associated with getting used to an Android device and I'm sure it will take a while. I'm getting to the point where I can do and find a lot of things that were different from iOS, but there are a lot of them I still don't quite understand the thought process behind.
My three main annoyances so far:
- Screen color reproduction
- I can't set up a VPN without changing to a password or PIN unlock method. I tried just setting a password and that wasn't enough. On my iPad I regularly VPN back to my house and SSH into one of my systems. I'm not really worried about the security of the VPN connection since I authenticate with the service I'm trying to use on the target machine.
- The Nexus 7 seems to hate most of my chargers. I have a bunch of U-Socket outlets in my home that I use for charging my iPhone, iPad, guests' phones, my GPS, etc. I just plug the charging cable into the USB plug on the outlet, and the device charges. They supply up to 2.4A per outlet, so they can deal with high draw devices. I've never had a problem with them charging anything until I got the Nexus 7. My iPad charger and my wife's Kindle charger don't work either. Somehow this thing flatly refuses to charge with anything other than the supplied ASUS adapter, even though it has a normal microUSB socket.
Three cool things:
- It fits in my cargo pants
- I can read in bed with it while laying down, which was a bit of a pain for me to do with the iPad. I love my iPad while sitting up, but the smaller paperback-like size is easier to hold in front of me.
- Apparently there was a $25 Google Play credit I didn't know about until I activated it last night. I don't know what to use it for (maybe an offline navigation app for starters) but it's kind of a cool bonus I wasn't expecting.
