[Nexus 7 General] e.mote:
To mods: Please move this thread to the newly created Nexus 7 forum. We'll do as Demandarin wants and let the Prime users suffer in peace. :)

Nexus 7 (N7 hereafter) is now official. Einride was right. No SD slot, no doubt due to Google's "cloud" focus. Same as Kindle Fire. Oh, well.

N7 is like KFire in other ways as well. N7: 198.5 x 120 x 10.45 mm; KFire: 190 × 120 × 11 mm. Same width, but about 1cm longer. Side bezel (in portrait) is thinner, since 1280x800 display is wider than KFire's 1024x600 (1.6 vs 1.7 aspect). N7 battery is 4325mAh, vs KFire's 4400mAh. Batt life is "up to 8hrs." Wifi is 2.4GHz only.

Six months ago, KFire was the flagship for value tabs. Now it's the N7 with higher-res display and more powerful SoC. KFire2 will have to up the bar again to compete. That's two jumps in one year, twice as fast as the typical 1-yr refresh. Gotta be happy about that. The no-SD slot, not so much. That's one obvious area of improvement that competitors can take up.

Not sure what Shinzz dude is going on about being a "phone UI." It's 7", so portrait use is more natural than landscape. The end bezel looks big because the side bezel is small.

Shinzz was more right about the N7 being a KFire competitor (read: kiosk) than I expected. The whole N7 presentation was about how it's made for Google content (vids/music/mags/etc). There wasn't anything about how apps are optimized for 7" form, or how development is made easier/better. It's just about Google content. I suppose that's what the public wants nowaday. But I would've preferred to see something beyond the conventional narrative, ie using the tablet for more than consuming content. How about things you can DO with a tablet? Not all of us are couch potatoes.

The vision thing aside, the hardware is great. N7 raises the bar on bang per buck. $200 now gets you 1280x800 IPS screen, 8hr battery life, and quadcore SoC. So what can a competitor bring? How about 16GB? And a damn SD slot.

Oh, and a keyboard cover, please. Sure, a 7" one. Yes, I can (barely) touch-type on my 7" BT keyboard.

Then there's the Nexus Q, a portal to the Google cloud. Functionally, it's a glorified media streamer, one grossly overpriced at $300 (vs the competition's $100). The flag-waving is nice, but maybe Google should've forgo the made-in-USA label and contracted it out to a Chinese vendor. HEY ASUS! Anyway, I think this will go over as well as GoogleTV. One-word impression: Not.

On the plus side, your cat will probably love it.

Moving on to Jelly. Despite being a minor update, everybody will want the faster UI speed. Sure, it's not actually faster, only that touch & display processing now has higher priority. But perception is reality. Other major features are Chrome and enhanced search, including offline voice typing. The last is a big boon for hands-off use. Nothing earthshaking, but more than enough for a point update.

Perhaps most importantly, AOSP drop is mid-July, which means most new devices should get it this year. Will CM Jelly be 9.1 or 10?

Glass was cool, I guess. The HW was impressive, of course. But other than the "impromptu video recording" examples, they didn't show any AR use, or info/search use. The base-jump shtick was a bit of showmanship, but it's not like we haven't seen live skydiving footage before. To be fair, they're still into HW development. At $1500 w/ shipment starting next year (for testers), I'm guessing this will show up in Q4 2013 at earliest. Say $500-600 retail? Would you buy one, and what would you use it for?

On the whole, this year's I/O didn't impress. The hardware (except for the Q-ball thing) is nice, and a welcome addition. But it's still the tired old vision of tablets being for consuming content, and content being from the Google cloud. It's emblematic that the N7 comes bundled with Transformers: Dark of the Moon, last year's flick. Goog dudes, get with the times.