[Nexus 7 General] pxlitup:
The title of this thread is exaggerated, but the message is more true than untrue.

Although there are many Nexus 7s with glass that sits firmly below the bezel, it is not as common as a show of hands on this forum would lead one to believe. The tech war mentality that has turned almost every mobile message board into a kind of staging ground has sucked some of the objectivity out of this place. I would argue that as soon as you want a product to succeed, or to fail, you've adopted either a defensive or aggressive posture from which to interpret that device's flaws.

For example, let's imagine that the Nexus 7 did not have this flaw, and later this year the iPad mini has hit the shelves. Every iPad mini that you've personally seen has the widely reported screen lift. There are reports of cracking, coupled with denial of warranty claims, but these reports -- although credible -- are not common. More than 50% of the users on Apple message boards are professing to have flush screens, but only two photos have been posted of devices without this problem.

How many of those Apple users' claims would you attribute either to blind loyalty or failure to inspect their devices?

Do you hold xda to the same level of scrutiny?

Many of the users in this thread who are claiming to have flush screens have inspected their device in a reliable, intelligent way. But there is a portion who do not want to know for sure and have more or less decided against looking too closely. Most of the blissfully ignorant are no doubt avoiding threads like this, probably enjoying an otherwise excellent product in a psychologically healthy way, but others are coming straight back from the store and hoisting it up like Simba without even a cursory inspection.

Unless you have examined the device from the right side, as if you wanted nothing more than to discover a section where the glass eclipses the bezel, your contribution to the incidence rate is premature.

How to check for screen lift.

I have told many users how to check for separation using this simple visual test, and more than half the time they discovered the flaw. Not an overwhelming majority, but not exactly reassuring either. Some users inspected their devices in this way and said that they found no eclipse (shout out to dirtyhamster73 with a record breaking two in a row), and that's good enough for me.

However, these legitimate user reports of flush screens are somewhat tempered by the fact that only two photos of a Nexus 7 without lift have been posted. These photos belong to users drewd and spreston. See attachments.

I personally went through three in a row before deciding to wait it out. Didn't notice the first one for a week. Returned it to the store and ordered from Google after reading so many posts by xda users without this issue. That one from the Play store had it as well, although it was minor. I took a picture of it and did a lot of research on xda to determine if this amount of separation was normal.

Sorry for the large image. The quality is too poor to downsize.

I even called Google Support and showed this photo to a rep to see if it was normal. Once I explained that I was looking across the display from the right and using the bezel on the far left side as a visual guide, he grabbed a nearby Nexus 7 and did the same test. He said that his bezel was visible from every angle and that mine was most certainly defective, and since xda members were still reporting flush screens in droves I decided to RMA it.

The third one was worse and had distortion when pressed along the left side. That one was not worth keeping, unlike the second...

After that I began to question users' claims of flush screens as politely as possible, and I've come to the conclusion that a huge portion of them are mistaken.

Providing careless information takes other users' autonomy away from them. Without an accurate idea of how prevalent this issue really is, I was unable to consider the option of keeping my second unit with the least significant lift of the three. For me this is no great loss, aside from my time and the pleasure of using the device, but when you consider the international viewers of this forum who will pay much more for their Nexus 7s, with no recourse for defects, it becomes troubling that some stranger could be misled into a major purchase by our wishful thinking.