Hasta La Gadget!

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 16:10 display, which forces you to flip over into text-only mode. The back-lit IPS display (1280×800 w/ 216 ppi) just isn’t dense enough to read copy in its more natural magazine form.

On the moving picture side of media, most of the popular shows you’d expect are now available for download but not everything is available as a whole. Only the latest season of uber popular shows like “Breaking Bad” are available, whereas the whole series to date is available on the Kindle Fire via Amazon. Otherwise shows and movies will stream automagically but you’ll have to manually force the download if you want to store it locally. Not a deal breaker but just an observation. Pricing is also competitive with similar offerings from Apple and Amazon.

Games play remarkably well on the N7 due in part to Butter and the quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. Another win over the Kindle Fire.

But this isn’t the final version of Jelly Bean, so things could change. For instance, the home screen is locked into portrait mode but flips between orientations in apps. Google Now is still a bit skittish. The prevailing issue, however, is the lack of tablet-specific apps for Android.

Will developers finally jump on board and optimize for tablets given the price point?

Something’s gotta give

Not a bad start for Google and Android but the hardware may be a deal breaker for some. But if sales of the Kindle Fire are any indication, its shortcomings might not matter to the general consumer. For early adopters or those looking for something less iterative, you may need to look elsewhere.

The Nexus 7 lacks expandable memory and only comes in 8GB ($199) and 16GB ($249) trim, which explains why video content is streamed by default. There’s also no way to output any content to a larger screen, so you’re stuck with whatever content you download to the 7-inch display. Luckily the screen is vibrant and offers pretty decent viewing angles but it definitely reflects a lot of light. Compared to the Kindle Fire, the 1280 x 800 screen on the N7 is much, much better. The display is listed as having Corning Glass. Whether that means it’s sporting Gorilla Glass or GG2 is anyone’s guess.

You’ll also want to mostly plug in headphones on the Nexus 7 as the speakers are placed on the lower portion of the backside and not along the edge.

At 0.74 pounds (compared to the Kindle Fire’s 0.9 pounds), the Nexus 7 is easy to hold and use for extended periods of time.

Files can be transferred to other Android devices via NFC, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Depending on usage and other variables like screen brightness, I managed to eek out just over seven hours. Based on other reviews, battery usage appears to range anywhere from six to nine hours.

The best part of the Asus hardware might be the fact that there is no back camera. Alternatively, you can’t do much with the front-facing camera other than hangout in Google Plus since there is no dedicated camera app.

Buy or Pass?

Look, if you’re looking for a 7-inch tablet or any tablet of the Android variety, you’d be hard pressed to find anything better than the Nexus 7. It runs vanilla Android (future proof, perhaps) that’s actually optimized for the hardware and is relatively cheap. It’s faster, nicer and smoother than the Kindle Fire but keep in mind the lack of tablet-specific apps and how Google is touting that it’s made for Google Play.

Nexus 7 [Google]

It’s that time of the year when folks in the US of A tend to get a tad bit patriotic. Pretty soon, those of us in the States will be all about grilling and putting back a few hot dogs and / or hamburgers before rushing off to catch some fireworks. We’re looking to keep the spirit alive in our weekly, too. This time around, we offer up a Made in the USA edition with editorials that tackle Nevada’s solar-geothermal hybrid power plant and just how much coin it takes to offer internet in American Samoa — along with a few more stops in between. The Nexus 7 and Nexus Q were revealed at Google I/O and we offer some initial thoughts on the pair of gadgets from the folks in Mountain View. Find yourself jonesin’ for a closer look at that fancy Tesla S? You’re in luck. You’ll find some detail shots of the new $50,000 EV in “Eyes-On” this week. So what are you waiting for? There’s a monster truck on the cover for crying out loud! Dive right in to the latest issue via your download method of choice.

Distro Issue 47 PDF
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Distro Issue 47: Made in the USA edition originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Jun 2012 09:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google has just announced over 10 million users that have signed into Google Drive, Google’s new cloud-syncing storage platform. The product only launched in April of this year, so this is quite the milestone. Clay Bavor, director of product management for Google Apps made the announcement, also mentioning that Google Drive is now available on iOS and Chrome OS.

He demoed Drive on the iPad, searching through a file full of receipts in the search box. It used optical character recognition to find the search query inside an image. But going even a step further than that, he searched for pyramid and Drive offered up saved images of the Egyptian pyramids. Offline saving and collaboration have been added to the platform, and all of that is available later today on the iPad.

Bavor also demoed Drive on the Chrome OS, showing the Drive icon in the application tray. “Everything is synced in the background in real-time.” He opened up a Google Doc via the Google Drive, which is present on other devices like his Chromebook and smartphone. But that’s not the exciting part. The best part is that Google Docs is now functional when editing offline, and available for presentations too.

Google also announced a Drive SDK version 2, which stores files created with 3rd party apps alongside everything else. He also mentioned that developers say Google Drive users are more active than others.

Click to view slideshow.

Take that, conventional wisdom! The oddball Google Nexus Q is made in the good ol’ US of A, proving that electronics can be assembled outside of China.

This fun little tidbit wasn’t mentioned during the Nexus Q’s announcement yesterday. Sure enough, a label on the bottom of the device says “Designed and Manufactured in the U.S.A.” That little label is also why the device costs so much.

Speaking to the NYT Andy Rubin explained that making the device in the U.S. is a bit of an experiment. “Why don’t we try it and see what happens,” he said. Rubin went on to state that Google is not in a sort of crusade with this project. In fact Google hasn’t revealed the actual Silicon Valley manufacturer nor is it saying where the Q’s components are made.

There was a time when electronics were made in the U.S. Early computer giants such as HP, Dell, even Atari made their products in the U.S. The promise of cheaper labor lured these companies elsewhere.

But things are changing again. The cost of labor in China is rising quickly. Plus, there is a large advantage to having your manufacturer literally down the road from the designers. Instead of spending weeks in China, engineers and designers can drive 10 minutes down the road to solve an issue.

The Q itself seems to be a bit of an experiment as well. Google revealed the product yesterday at its yearly developers conference. Basically, the Q is jukebox which pulls media from Google’s cloud services. An Android phone or tablet tells the Q what media to play, and the Q grabs the media from online. This is fundamentally different from Apple’s Airplay service which produces the same result, but instead streams the media from the mobile device itself. The Q is a bit strange, and with a price of $299, it’s a hard sell for what’s essentially a set of features that should be built into Google’s other streaming product, the floundering Google TV.

The Q’s higher price is a direct result of assembling it in the U.S., says Google. The company hopes to drop the price over time as the product volume increases. But the question remains, will consumers, even American consumers, spend $299 on a device with a very limited feature set even if it’s made in the U.S.?

[image via NYT and Wired]

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Built specifically for Google Play consumption, the Nexus 7 tablet built by Asus seems to be Google’s answer to both the iPad and Kindle Fire. So how does it stack up and just how buttery smooth is Jelly Bean?

It’s nearly impossible to say after only a few minutes with the device, but on a superficial level, it’s pretty nice. With an IPS display the screen is vibrant with fairly decent viewing angles. HD videos look sharp. Speaker placement is a bit weird but audio quality sounds pretty good. The textured rear looks and feels high-end.

Jelly Bean is noticeably smoother and faster, including app launching. Due to the screen dimensions, I’m not really digging the magazine experience, though. The ability to go from the normal magazine layout to a text-only format is a nice feature akin to most every other read it later app iOS and Android users have grown accustomed to.

Social sharing between the Nexus 7 and Q for audio and video is seamless and works quite well.

But that’s it for now. I’ll have a more in-depth look at the Nexus 7 later today.