Early impressions of Google Nexus 7

A longer blog post on my early impressions of Google Nexus 7 with Android 4.2 (in comparsion with an iPad 2 with iOS 6.0.1).

The first thing that hits me is that I like the GUI although i have a well imprinted reflex that the device should unlock after I have typed the unlock code, not that I have to tap <enter> afterwards. I would have liked to be able to disbale the sleep state and locking of the device for example if I'm cooking and have the reciept open on my device. Android and iOS has almost the same setting periods but iOS also has ''never'' as a setting. 

The GUI is slick and nice-looking. There are some graphics when switching between apps, settings and similar but not overly much. Just some to better the experience. Except for the unlocking of the device. I have no big difficulties to learn the OS GUI which should mean that it's quite intuitive. Some applications are not as intuitive as the OS, sometimes because their GUI differ from the OS GUI. Speaking of the GUI I think the cursor is to discrete. It's hard to find or follow sometimes.

Something I discovered early is that I, myself, seem to drain some energy from the battery by using my devices. I always seem to have worse battery time than others (even when I don't play games which use a lot of graphics). One reason, I guess, could be that I use the wireless a lot, many synchronisations going on in the background and similar. The accompanying charger is at about 2 A similar to my iPad charger. The charger is reasonbly small looking at the voulme. It is a little wide though and can block outlets in a power chord with several outlets (wich can happen with the iPad charger as well but less often since its wide in another direction). It was a little pity though that my iPhone chargers at about 1 A don't seem to be strong enough to keep the Google Nexus 7 alive. They work for keeping the iPad alive and slowly slowly charge it and they are very compact and easy to bring a few of even in a small bag. It would have been nice to be able to have the same charger for whatever device I need to charge. I usually have two iPhone chargers in my small day bag which means that I know that I can charge two devices when it's Apple devices. Now it seems like I will have to switch chargers depending on what devices I bring which is an extra thing to think of. It also gives the effect that if I bring two Apple devices (e g my private and my work phone) and the Google Nexus 7 I either have to bring one Apple charger and one Asus charger (and not being able to charge both Apple devices at the same time) or bring three chargers (one for each device) or find some new small chargers working for all of my devices (which would be an extra cost). I'll do some more experimenting with the chargers. It seems like it should work with the iPhone charger to keep it alive. Time will show.

Having a new extra clean touch screen I also discovered that I apparently have very dirty little paws. It didn't take long for the screen to be so nice looking anymore. Maybe should get a screen protection that also repulse dirt (as I have for my iPad).

Since I do a lot of writing with my iPad I have a Apple keyboard (I like that one) in a case that unfolds to an iPad stand and keyboard holder. I wanted to be able to use that one for whichever of my devices and it works fine with iPhone, iPAd and Google Nexus 7. A bonus with iOS is that it's possible to ''sleep'' the keyboard and ''wake it up'' with the eject button on the keyboard. A bonus with Android on the other hand is that <alt> + <tab> works for switching between applications. It's quite nice to be able to do that without leaving the keyboard. When pairing with a BlueTooth keyboard on iOS it uses the keyboard layout that the OS is using and I don't know if that's possible to change. In Android it is possible to set keyboard layout independently for virtual keyboard and physical keyboard. When attaching my keyboard with Swedish layout to my Android with Swedish virtual keyboard the keyboard got U.S. layout but Android notified me and asked if I wanted to set the layout for the newly attached keyboard. When typing (for example this text) in Android on the Nexus 7 I think the fonts mostly are nice but the cursor is a little too discrete and sometimes hard find or follow but maybe I get used to that after a while.

Although I primarily use Apple computers with Mac OS and iOS devices both in work as System Administrator and privately I don't use Apple cloud services that much (mainly for backing up my devices settings, sharing open web browser tabs and similar). Instead I use Google Apps for business with my own domain. That made it very easy to get going with the new device since I almost only had to login with my Google account and then had mail, calendars, chat, blogs and one of two big social network services ready to go. 

Very soon I also started to think that my iPad is a little heavy and not so easy to handle but without having ahd the possibility to do any good comparsion between the Google Nexus 7 and the iPad Mini I think they are very similar in those aspects. They're about the same weight but the iPad Mini is slightly larger but have a more larger screen than the whole device is larger (the device surface is more effectively used for physical screen).

One thing I started to like soon was the better notifications about what applications I install wants to do and settings for what they will be able to do. The settings for these kind of things are very broad in iOS. Also the equivalent to the iOS Notification Center in Android is better. It shows more and is divided in two parts. More system oriented notifications to the right and more applications oriented notifications to the left.

 

When I first started up the device and started to download applications there were a grace period for authorising spending money in the app shop (Google Play) with I didn't really like since that means that it is easier to make mistakes or maybe for a kid to keep on buying and buying. Besides that I just like that I have to authenticate to authorise things like shopping on the device. In iOS 6 there's a setting for forcing the user to authenticate everytime which effectively blocks shopping if you don't have the credentials for the connected Apple ID or, which is OK, switch to your own Apple ID. When i upgraded to 4.2, which soon appeared, Google Play started to ask for credentials every time which I think is good but there's still no setting for it. you have to live with whatever the OS is set on. Android still allows for installations of free apps without authentication which I don't really like either. Both iOS and Android allows upgrading of apps without authentication.

It seems like Google Nexus 7 is gonna be able to be a good replacement for communication, reading and blogging but i will miss a lot of my games from the iPad and also there seem to be fewer sketching apps and maybe fewer digital versions of papers/magazine but time might show otherwise.

I'll finish this off with a list of applications that i have used in iOS 6.0.1 and also found for Android 4.2

* WordFeud

* Evernote

* Dropbox

* Gmail

* FaceBook

* Google+

* Google Drive

* BeeJive IM

* Skype

* Pinterest

* Last.fm Scrobbler (in iOS I used CludScrob which only scrobbles, Last.fm Android App do more)

* Instagram

* LinkedIn

* Tapatalk forum app

* Twitter's own Twitter App but none of the two I mostly use (Twitterific and TwitBird Pro)

* Tumblr's own app

* Google Maps

* gTasks (Google Tasks App)

* Todo.txt (Task organizing app using a textfile for storage, versatile from many different interfaces)

* Google Chrome

* Comixology (so far tried Mouse Guard wich works fine in guided mode but not so fine with whole pages)

* Dark Horse Comics

* EMP Magazine (Sweden Rock Shop catalouge)

* Bluefire Reader (e-book reader that understands the protections of the e-books from Swedish libraries)

* Safari to go (Safari Books Online with offline storage)

* Kindle (e-books from Amazon)

Moon+ Reader Pro seems to be a nice PDF reader replacement. So far I have only read the PDF versions of Girl Genious wich is i kind of A4 format but haven't tested any A4 text heavy PDF:s wich I have heard can be a problem on a 7 inch screen.