[Nexus 7 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] sysrpl:
I received my Google Nexus 7 tablet in the mail a few days ago. While I believe it's a good step forward, I couldn't help but to be annoying by the many little problems I've had with it so far. Below is a partial list of problems I've had with it. I'd love it if someone could give an explanation why Google decided to ship the Nexus 7 with these problems and hope Google fixes them or changes their priorities to address problems like these in the future.

My unformatted list of Nexus 7 problems:

Cannot use Google Voice to make phone calls without downloading a fix from third party software makers. What’s the point of the Google Voice app if by default it doesn’t allow you to make/receive phone calls?

Cannot place custom makers such as “girlfriend’s house” or “grandma’s house” or “picnic spot” in the Navigate app. You cannot say “navigate to grandma’s house” to Google Now.

The Navigate app seems to have enough deficiencies that I question whether it is actually a working app meant to help you navigate. First, you must preload an area if you ever plan on using it to navigate. Second, you must ask to navigate before you leave home while you still have a wireless signal. Third, if while navigating you make a wrong turn the navigation stops working because it tries to recalculates the route then stops when it tries to find the new route and determines the data connection (your wireless network) is no longer available. It also seems to be missing many common navigation features like estimating your speed, miles traveled, or helping to calculate gas mileage (allowing you to input gas amount at fill ups).

When opening search results from Google Now in Chrome two tabs are always opened at the same time. Also, loading pages in Chrome after a Google Now takes too much time. While on my home broadband connection it take 8, 9, or 10 seconds to load a page. It seems like more is going on than simply loading a web page (maybe a few redirects for Google to record/register the search result you picked in order to improve Google Now?).

The main screen, your desktop, does not orient itself based on how you are holding the tablet, while apps can and do. As far as I know, you have to root the tablet and edit some files to get this behavior. This leads me to ask, why didn’t Google just include an option/setting to give the user a choice?

In Google Music the track position slider is placed too close to the next/prior/play/pause/stop buttons. Attempting to move the position regularly results in a pause/stop instead. This is a big pain for resuming audio books when the place marker gets lost if you ever switch tracks (listening to music before the 6 hour audio book is complete). The position slider is also too small (again consider seeking in a 6 hour audio book file). When in landscape mode Google Music splits the controls on one side of the screen and cover art on the other. The net effect is there is no configuration to provide a large track position slider.

Google Play does offer a way to search or browse all widgets. You can see a list of “top widgets”, but when you search it searches for everything, that is all apps and not just for widgets.

Some apps which include widgets are not showing as available for for placement on my desktop. They don’t appear in the list of available widgets. Specifically I downloaded an FTP app with a desktop widget to quickly enable/disable the FTP server. This widget is not to be found in my availble list of widgets.

The “My Library” widget is awkward and hard to use. I am not even sure if it works correctly. I have several podcasts and audio books, but when click their tiles in the “My Library” widget, nothing happens.

Options are a mess. My eyesight is really poor and getting worse. I can use options in one place to increase the fonts size, and that same option is missing or moved somewhere else in another application. Even the options buttons move around from app to app. Regarding text size, on a PC at least I can change the font size system wide by changing display properties in one place.

While the voice search in Google Now, there are certain chinks in its voice recognition which become frustrating very quickly. I tried to send my friend an email about the “olympics day one”, and it kept thinking I saying “olympics they want” even though I was speaking cleanly and clearly with a mid west american accent. Similar misunderstanding have happened occasionally, and when I try to correct them by speaking again and again, the voe recognition gets it wrong every time. Eventually I give up and manually type out my words.