Google Nexus 7

[wasp_f15ting]

So.. are any of you fellas picking this beauty up at the end of the month?

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/07/divine-intervention-googles-nexus-7-is-a-fantastic-200-tablet/
http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/29/3125396/google-nexus-7-review

For the price it seems great, and it has an innovative UI which is new and interesting unlike the ageing / boring rubbish that is IOS. Matias Duarte has done an amazing amount of work on making this design work.

I think android tablet apps are lacking at the moment, but hopefully sales of this will make things better. For the interim i'll be using it as a reading / browsing device.

[biggytitbo]

I've took the plunge, at £160 you can't go wrong.

[KLG-7A]

I've took the plunge, at £160 you can't go wrong.

Yeah. £160 would be good for a slab that plays movies alone. This is just great.

[olliebean]

I probably would if I hadn't managed to grab an HP Touchpad, now happily running Android, for 90 quid last year during the big sell-off.

[falafel]

So.. are any of you fellas picking this beauty up at the end of the month?

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/07/divine-intervention-googles-nexus-7-is-a-fantastic-200-tablet/
http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/29/3125396/google-nexus-7-review

For the price it seems great, and it has an innovative UI which is new and interesting unlike the ageing / boring rubbish that is IOS. Matias Duarte has done an amazing amount of work on making this design work.

I think android tablet apps are lacking at the moment, but hopefully sales of this will make things better. For the interim i'll be using it as a reading / browsing device.

I thought you loved your iPad?

[biggytitbo]

The new google now thing in android 4.1 looks good, seems to wipe the floor with siri for speed and accuracy:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEfZCeQdRXs&feature=related

[Big Jack McBastard]

I've took the plunge, at £160 you can't go wrong.

Except you'd be giving Google money of course..

[wasp_f15ting]

falfel, I did but it started causing me issues..

like the retina version of wired / new yorker were slowing down tremendously when you flipped the pages. The rendering was taking 1/2 a second.. or a device of that price I didn't expect to have to experience that on a device of that price. So after a few months of playing around with it and not using it much I decided to get rid of it.

They say the A5x is powerful, but It didn't even render .mkv files from avplayerHD in any decent manner full of stuttering. For a media consumption device its extremely locked down and only usable with stuff that apple shit out through their pipes.

I also had a horrendous experience with itunes match. A paid service of £20 a year it lets you ideally download the music on your main PC from anywhere through itunes.. sounds ideal and great for someone like me who was on the road a lot. But... the piece of crap matches all right but puts gap in your classical music so you get the 1s delay, then takes the profanity out of all your music to, by matching your sweary tracks to parent friendly stuff. So annoying.. all in all apple have stretched me to the very brink of sanity.

The constant app crashes too.. eveyone just reloads the app but it is STILL a crash. That paired with horrendous synchronous issues when there is an update.. error every single time.. I HATE how itunes / ipad /iphone work on the PC.

Soo.. I decided to say FUCK apple and concentrate on giving my hard earned cash on MS and Google Instead.

[biggytitbo]

I never really understood apples much vaunted but totally imaginary usability and slickness - that whole 'it just works' bullshit. No, no it doesn't. ITunes is a fucking disaster as a piece of software, never works properly and is as initiative and arcane as is possible. When I upgraded iOS on my iPad via iTunes on my pc, not only was it a confusing, painful and baffling experience, when it finally worked it had wiped half the apps and settings on the iPad for no apparent reason. Getting content on it via iTunes, well as a process it'd probabbly be easier and quicker to try and will some music and videos onto the iPad solely with the power of my mind.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

It's a tempting price[nb]or would be, if I weren't skint[/nb], and there is a certain futuristic appeal to tablets but, as with all these devices, I run into the question of just what the hell do I want one for? The desktop handles all the internet and media stuff I want, there's the Xbox for watching videos in the lounge, and if I'm away from them, my phone is an adequate substitute. Does it fill a niche that isn't covered by those other things, or is it just a pure extravagance?

[biggytitbo]

I use mine chiefly for browsing on the settee or in bed, watching youtube, tune in radio and board games like word with friends.

[MojoJojo]

Yeah - it's not something you need, but you'd probably find nice to have. Whether it's extravagant or not depends on how much £160 is to you.

[Eis Nein]

I never really understood apples much vaunted but totally imaginary usability and slickness - that whole 'it just works' bullshit. No, no it doesn't. ITunes is a fucking disaster as a piece of software, never works properly and is as initiative and arcane as is possible. When I upgraded iOS on my iPad via iTunes on my pc, not only was it a confusing, painful and baffling experience, when it finally worked it had wiped half the apps and settings on the iPad for no apparent reason. Getting content on it via iTunes, well as a process it'd probabbly be easier and quicker to try and will some music and videos onto the iPad solely with the power of my mind.

Still the same shit a dozen years later. I had a meticulously maintained mp3 collection around the millennium. About a 1000 or so, all named and allocated to structured directories (this was pre-useful and flexible tag maintenance and player software), when it took hours to rip CDs and 56kbps was king. I installed iTunes and the stinking piece of shite renamed the lot with generic titles, unbidden, and dumped them into a directory.

Took a while to change degrees and retrain, although oncology wasn't a huge leap, but I finally got the fucker.

[Replies From View]

I installed iTunes and the stinking piece of shite renamed the lot with generic titles, unbidden, and dumped them into a directory.

It's massively controlling.  In a previous thread I complained that you can drag tracks onto your iPhone folder in iTunes (copying them to the phone), but not drag those tracks back onto your computer if you happen to lose or delete them.  It comes as a shock when you're used to your phone being treated as a standard USB storage device.  An app called iExplorer lets you get to your files but they all have incomprehensible names suddenly, so you need to make guesses based on file sizes.

When I mentioned this before, about two people agreed with me and helped me find iExplorer.  Everyone else saw my criticism as absurdly minor, as if I must have gone out of my way to find this limitation, rather than stumbled across it.  Questions like "why would you need to do that though?" abounded.  It's baffling to me that people embrace these restrictions so completely.

[jutl]

When I mentioned this before, about two people agreed with me and helped me find iExplorer.  Everyone else saw my criticism as absurdly minor, as if I must have gone out of my way to find this limitation, rather than stumbled across it.  Questions like "why would you need to do that though?" abounded.  It's baffling to me that people embrace these restrictions so completely.

It is a shitty system, but arguably it helped ease record companies toward digital distribution. It's unfortunate that users have to suffer for that to have happened, and that it still persists even now that other platforms are significantly freer. Copytrans is a good solution for recovering tracks from iPods/iPhones/iPads with metadata intact.

[Replies From View]

Copytrans is a good solution for recovering tracks from iPods/iPhones/iPads with metadata intact.

Thanks for this!  As I have an Apple computer not a PC[nb]Making the imposed limitations even more bizarre to me[/nb], I may have to go with the one of the other variants linked on that page.  Possibly Xport.  Very much appreciated!

[MojoJojo]

I never really understood apples much vaunted but totally imaginary usability and slickness - that whole 'it just works' bullshit. No, no it doesn't. ITunes is a fucking disaster as a piece of software, never works properly and is as initiative and arcane as is possible. When I upgraded iOS on my iPad via iTunes on my pc, not only was it a confusing, painful and baffling experience, when it finally worked it had wiped half the apps and settings on the iPad for no apparent reason. Getting content on it via iTunes, well as a process it'd probabbly be easier and quicker to try and will some music and videos onto the iPad solely with the power of my mind.

A lot of it's historical - smartphone interfaces were awful before the iPhone. Now they're all pretty much as good as each other.

iTunes is awful, though.

[Ignatius_S]

David Pogue and Walt Mossberg reviews.

Pogue mentions about how Google doesn't make money on the 8GB model by selling direct (which means that it makes a loss when sold by retailers) and there's been a new breakdown of components that suggest this is the case. The All Things D look at the teardown is here.

Anandatech has posted a mini-review of the Nexus 7 and Jelly Bean. As ever, it's a decent read that has a nifty chart comparing the unit to other Asus-manufactured tablets. For those who like such things, there's a decent range of benchmarks – it made me wonder how useful benchmarks are with tablets (I should mention, that as a rule, I'm only interested in real-world tests).

There's also a follow-up article about the Nexus 7 natively support mounting USB storage.

[Sayan Jerome]

When I mentioned this before, about two people agreed with me and helped me find iExplorer.  Everyone else saw my criticism as absurdly minor, as if I must have gone out of my way to find this limitation, rather than stumbled across it.

That was not the reaction at all. It was one of bemusement, i.e:

"How did you not know that before you bought an iPad, given that it's one of the major criticisms of iTunes and Apple products?"

You are a consistently specious baby.

[Replies From View]

That was not the reaction at all. It was one of bemusement, i.e:

"How did you not know that before you bought an iPad, given that it's one of the major criticisms of iTunes and Apple products?"

You are a consistently specious baby.

I didn't have an iPad before I had that discussion, and nobody indicated that that's what they thought I meant, so no.  I got an iPhone without knowing that specific quirk, and it didn't even cross my mind (gosh) and I started the thread because I wanted a solution.  Yeah, I was mostly getting comments like the above (except it wasn't an iPad) and only a few people bothered helping with the actual solution - that's what I was saying.  Hardly specious.

Why do people I'm unaware of ever communicating with before keep coming out of the woodwork with off-topic notes about my personality and consistency?  So bizarre.

[Sayan Jerome]

Define 'keep coming out of the woodwork' and I'll agree with you about not being specious...

[Replies From View]

Why am I supposed to keep having discussions about my apparently useless personality with people who've never communicated with me before?  I don't care about me being or not being specious in your mind.  Bog off.

[biggytitbo]

Anyone got one yet? Annoyingly online retailers are already shopping it but if you preordered on google's store like I did it still says 1-2 weeks.

[Sayan Jerome]

I think I'll get one for no reason. Is it WIFI only or does it take a SIM or what?

[Mildly Diverting]

I cannot believe they haven't included a microSD. Even if you go for the big lad you're still only looking at 14GB storage. I'll wait for the next version.

[biggytitbo]

I cannot believe they haven't included a microSD. Even if you go for the big lad you're still only looking at 14GB storage. I'll wait for the next version.

It's intended for consuming content over wifi or from the cloud though, so the lack of additional storage is deliberate. I think if you want to be able to store a lot of stuff on the device you're best off getting something else anyway.

[Consignia]

I'm really tempted by the price, but I can't justify any reason to have one. I already have an android tablet, the Transformer 1, which serves me well. And for the smaller form factor, I have a Vita which does everything I'd want to do on a tablet that size.

Looks lovely, though.

[Pseudopath]

I think if you want to be able to store a lot of stuff on the device you're best off getting something else anyway.

Or root it and use StickMount to mount an big fat external hard drive full of "Movies, Games and Videos"®

[biggytitbo]

Or root it and use StickMount to mount an big fat external hard drive full of "Movies, Games and Videos"®

What so you have this tiny lightweight portable device you can hold in one hand and you attach whacking great external hard drive to it? Surely your better off with a wireless nas?

[wasp_f15ting]

Biggy, they are shipping them now apparently they just tweeted.
Mine hasn't shipped yet though :'(

I am seeing in a few forums that people already have it the lucky beggars.