Tablets How speedy is the Nexus 7 with rendering PDFs?

[kylera]

I'm thinking of getting a Nexus 7 as a second tablet, and I would like to carry my PDF textbooks and supplementary reading materials (article scans, magazine cutouts, etc.) with me when I'm out and about. Is the 7 powerful enough to show PDFs of hundreds of pages without lagging significantly?

Thanks in advance.

 

[mathi-vadhanan]

Tegra3 is starting to show its age now. I'd say wait for the next generation of 7 inch tablets. I prefer ios on tablets, for reading and browsing web. But i'm not sure how iPad mini stacks against nexus7.

 

[Essenar]

I feel like the Nexus 7 is pretty quick at rendering PDF's. We're getting sort of close to the 2013 Nexus 7 release announcements. If you want to pick one up second hand, I've seen them go relatively cheap on Craig's List.

I'll have you know- I've personally had a much easier time opening PDF's embedded in a website on my iPad Mini than I did with my Nexus 7. Yes I rooted, flashed a custom rom, etc. I just found that out of the box, the iPad felt 'smoother'. I would attribute the higher resale price on this type of experience.

 

[2298754]

Pretty slow, especially large PDFs (like textbooks, etc).

I have a 300+ mb PDF for one of my classes and the Nexus 7 I used to own would slow to a crawl. It would take forever to open and even navigate around the PDF. My iPad has zero issues with it. Even my Note 2.

 

[paulsalter]

Just tested on mine

A 300 MB file using PDF Reader takes about a second to fully display each page

Using my Book reading app to view it and it is instant, no lag

 

[chagla]

should be fine. just make sure you use Adobe PDF Reader instead of other 3rd party pdf readers. quadcore cpu with 2gb ram is pretty powerful beast.

 

[knucklehead]

You're lucky that you have a very specific requirement -- makes life simple.

Using iAnnotate on my N7, navigation through a long document is terrible. The stock N7 reader isn't good either. If you open the PDF in Kindle reader, navigation is fine, but that's about it feature wise.

There might be an Android PDF app they will do what you want, but don't assume anything from the specs -- check for yourself if possible. I'm finding lots of difficulties dealing with long documents in many apps on both my N7, and N4, so it doesn't seem to be a hardware specific issue.

Shortage of good apps, or perhaps an OS problem yet to be resolved??? Just make sure there's a workable solution for you before you commit.

 

[kylera]

Thanks for your replies so far. It seems I should wait it out until the second generation, which could be in May...could be.

 

[Bahroo]

I feel like the Nexus 7 is pretty quick at rendering PDF's. We're getting sort of close to the 2013 Nexus 7 release announcements. If you want to pick one up second hand, I've seen them go relatively cheap on Craig's List.

I'll have you know- I've personally had a much easier time opening PDF's embedded in a website on my iPad Mini than I did with my Nexus 7. Yes I rooted, flashed a custom rom, etc. I just found that out of the box, the iPad felt 'smoother'. I would attribute the higher resale price on this type of experience.

I think its because iOS has better GPU acceleration then Android that the Mini feels smoother with PDF's over the Tegra 3, even though the Tegra 3 is faster then the A5 chip

 

[Essenar]

I think its because iOS has better GPU acceleration then Android that the Mini feels smoother with PDF's over the Tegra 3, even though the Tegra 3 is faster then the A5 chip

Yeah, it's very strange. The Tegra 3 smokes the A5 but for some reason the iPad Mini just feels smoother than my N7 did. I did love the form factor on the N7. It felt more "portable" and the resolution looked sharper. I really wanted to love it, I really did. I just felt like it needed a little more "Wow" to it. I definitely love the price tag. I think hands down, you can't do better than a Nexus 7 if you want to spend around $150-200 (You can get a used 8/16GB for less than that easily, good luck getting a Mini in that range. Even an iPod Touch 5G for less than $200 is a tough swallow).

It's worth noting that even the Nexus 4 in some ways, would be a lot snappier than the Nexus 7.

 

[TacticalDesire]

For PDFs I like iOS although with no file system it could be an issue with managing them or sharing with multiple apps. You could have duplicate copies throughout multiple apps. But for most of my tablet use, iOS is great.