Google Nexus 7 Review: When Hardware And Software (Mostly) Become One

Little by little, Google is slowly piecing together a more cohesive and complete mobile OS. Having the right hardware to drive Android doesn’t hurt either. While the Nexus 7 isn’t quite what I expected Google to roll out last week at I/O given the Motorola Mobility acquisition, it’s arguably the first real Android tablet to date.

With a $200 starting price, Android users and those looking for a smaller tablet now have a legitimate alternative to the Kindle Fire.

Smooth as butta

At its core the Asus-built tablet would be nothing if not for Jelly Bean (Android v4.1) and vice versa. Project Butter has made a surprising impact smoothing out the overall feel and experience with faster app switching (multitasking), frame rates and animations. Touch responsiveness has also seen an overhaul from past iterations of Android that tracks more accurately. Roboto, the system font for Android, has also been tweaked in Jelly Bean with better readability across the OS. Notifications are now actionable delivering even more content without having to actually launch a particular app. It can, however, cause sensory overload when notifications are expanded with a simple two-finger gesture.

Jelly Bean is also the first iteration of the OS that focuses on properly onboarding new users with semi-transparent overlays chock-full of helpful tips and tricks. Voice dictation can be taken offline, which is a plus considering the Nexus 7 appears to only be shipping in Wi-Fi trim. But it’s not quite the Assistant some had expected. It falls somewhere in between simple voice dictation and Siri for basic search queries. Most, if not all, Google apps come preloaded like the updated Google Maps and the new default Chrome web browser, which is noticeably faster than the ho-hum default browser on pre-Jelly-Bean devices. (Oddly enough, though, the Galaxy Nexus loaded with Jelly Bean given out at I/O still carries the old browser and Chrome has to be downloaded.)

The magazine experience on the Nexus 7 is just as wretched as it is on the Kindle Fire. Design is a huge part of what makes magazines great and that is all but lost on the Nexus 7 because of the 16:9 display, which forces you to flip over into text-only mode. The back-lit IPS display (1280