Nexus 7 review: the best $200 tablet you can buy

 Nexus 7 review:

In 2008, when the Eee PC was revolutionizing the computing world and driving every manufacturer to make cheaper and smaller laptops, Sony washed its hands of the whole thing. The "race to the bottom," the company said, would profoundly impact the industry, killing profit margins and flooding the market with cheap, terrible machines. Sony was wrong, its stance lasting about a year before joining the competition with its own VAIO W.
Four years on we're buying better laptops than ever before and, with the netbook class now more or less dead, that downward competition seems to have shifted to the tablet front. A flood of cheap, truly awful slates preceded Amazon's Kindle Fire, the $200 tablet from a major brand that looks to have been the proper catalyst in plunging prices. The latest challenger to enter the competition is ASUS, partnering with Google to create the first Nexus tablet, a device that not only will amaze with its MSRP, but with its quality. It's called the Nexus 7, it too is $200, and it's better than Amazon's offering in every way but one.
Move further down toward the bottom of the back and you'll find the device's single speaker. It's a slit that runs roughly two-thirds of the way across the back, centered and sitting about a half-inch above the bottom -- which is, by the way, where you'll find the tablet's only ports. Centered down there is a micro-USB connector and, to the far right side when looking at the display, the 3.5mm headphone jack. That's it. Thankfully, ASUS's proprietary connector found on the Transformer tablets doesn't make an appearance here, but neither do we get a dedicated HDMI output, which is a bit of a bummer. (You can, of course, use an MHL adapter if you like.)

On the left edge of the device, the same four contacts present on the Galaxy Nexus can be found, presumably waiting to be tickled by some future accessory, while up top you'll find ... nothing. Just the silvery ring that runs around the full device. It looks like brushed metal, but feels more like plastic. Even so, the tablet has a very sturdy, strong feel to it -- but that's partly thanks to it being just a little bit chunky.
It measures 10.45mm (0.41 inches) thick, which is just half a millimeter thinner than the Kindle Fire -- itself no slender belle. But, crucially, it weighs much less: 340g (12 ounces) versus 413g (14.6 ounces) for the Fire. That's a very noticeable difference and it makes the Nexus 7 much nicer to carry around. Its curved edges, too, make it far more comfortable.
On the inside is an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor running at 1.2GHz (though it can step up to 1.3GHz when it wants to) and paired with 1GB of RAM with either eight or 16 gigs of flash storage (doubling the capacity will cost you a $50 premium). As there's no microSD expansion here, you'll probably want to pay the extra cash. WiFi (802.11b/g/n) is your only option for data connectivity, though there's naturally Bluetooth and NFC, not to mention GPS, an accelerometer, a digital compass and a gyroscope, too.

Display and sound

Budget tablets typically make the biggest sacrifices on the display front, and certainly the 1,024 x 600 resolution on the Kindle Fire feels a bit constricting at this point. Not so with the Nexus 7, which is fronted by a very nice 1,280 x 800 IPS panel rated at 400 nits of brightness. While more pixels is always better -- the new iPad and its Retina display having made us yearn for ridiculously high resolutions in all our devices -- WXGA feels perfectly adequate here. Text is rendered very well and 720p videos look great.
Much of that, though, is thanks to the other, less quantifiable aspects of the screen. Viewing angles are top-notch, with contrast staying strong regardless of which side you're coming from. And, it's plenty bright, too, a properly nice screen that, like everything else here, is just a little nicer than you'd expect given the cost.
Audio, however, isn't exactly fighting above its class. The speakers integrated in the back and peeking out through a slender slit toward the bottom deliver a decent amount of sound that isn't too unpleasant to listen to. It passes the "loud enough to fill a hotel room" test but the quality at those levels will leave you reaching for your earbuds.

Performance and battery life

When Jen-Hsun Huang teased Tegra 3-powered tablets would drop under $200 this summer he obviously knew what was coming, but what we didn't know was just how far back those tablets would have to be scaled to make that price point. If you've been reading all the way through to here (and we love you for it) you'll know we haven't yet found a real compromise made to achieve that price. Compromises will not be found in this section, either.
Okay, so a 35-second boot time does leave a little bit to be desired, but once you're inside the OS, applications load quickly and respond briskly, even graphics-heavy ones like the Google Play magazine app. Webpages are rendered promptly and swiping through them is snappy. Sure, there are the occasional stutters and hiccups here that even a coating of Butter doesn't completely eliminate, but we've experienced those with even the top-shelf tablets, like the recent Transformer Pad Infinity TF700 with its 1.7GHz version of the Tegra 3 processor.
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