back to article Apple KILLER decloaked? Google lovingly unboxes Nexus 7 Android 4.3 slablette

Google has been showing off its new Nexus 7 fondleslab running the latest version of Android, including a 4G LTE version that's the first hardware to allow 4G reception from a variety of competing carriers. "By the end of the year, consumers are going to buy more tablets than PCs. That's an amazing statistic," said Sundar …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nice but...

    I think it's becoming way over due for these things to be equipped with something better than just 32GB of storage.

    1. JDX Gold badge

      Re: Nice but...

      So buy one with an SD slot.

      1. scarshapedstar
        FAIL

        Love to, but...

        ...it doesn't exist.

        1. JDX Gold badge

          Re: Love to, but...

          >>...it doesn't exist.

          Android tablets with SD slots don't exist? Or one specific tablet doesn't support it... if only there were a multitude of Android products available.

          1. Slef

            Re: Love to, but...

            would the fruity fanboys understand your comment or does it need spelling out to them lol ;better not to mention that some have both sd and micro sd slots...lol

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Nice but...

        My music archive is huge and wouldn't fit on a 64GB drive. I'd get it for travel and the commute where Wifi is not available generally. I would burn through my data plan in a week with Google Music. I have a huge card in my Razr Maxx HD which takes care of business. It's a lot smaller than the Nexus 7.

        Sorry. Deal breaker. I've been waiting too.

    2. johnnytruant

      Re: Nice but...

      32GB is a lot of apps. You keep your personal data on Drive/Dropbox/your local NAS/whatever.

      At least that's how it's supposed to work in Googleland.. and how it does work for me. My tablet has almost nothing actually on it. It's a streaming target from my big hard-disked media server and the internet.

      1. edge_e
        Big Brother

        Re: Nice but...

        You keep your personal data on Drive/Dropbox/your local NSA/whatever.

        There, fixed it for you

        1. 123465789
          Joke

          Re: Nice but...

          NSA? Just store it on /dev/null ... just as likely to ever give you back your personal data.

        2. Byham

          Re: Nice but...

          A Freudian slip? I presume you meant Network Attached Storage NAS not NSA - However, with all cloud storage where you put your data outside your physical security perimeter you may as well be storing it with the NSA due to cozy agreements with the security services by the software/hardware suppliers and the various entities involved.

      2. Mark .

        Re: Nice but...

        If I'm at home, I'd rather watch videos on the big TV (or at least a laptop) than a tiny screen that I have to hold. Tablets make great portable media players (after all, that was what they were called in 2009 and earlier, before the media had to come up with a new name to pretend Apple had invented something new), but if you've only got a Wifi device, or your mobile connection isn't unlimited (or you're watching on the tube etc).

        32GB is a lot of apps. How many blu-ray quality films is it, to make use of that Full HD screen?

        The only feasible solution is USB OTG, which works, though I'd rather more memory or a microSD.

        1. Mikel
          Thumb Up

          Re: Nice but...

          Fortunately for you they announced the Chromecast too. So you can browse your NAS with chrome browser and then stream to the tv in FullHD. $35 and includes 3 months Netflix. And supports 1080p netflix too.

          1. Rattus Rattus

            Re: Nice but...

            "Chromecast", Dropbox, Drive, whatever. All of it no use at all if you have shit mobile connectivity. Google, I love your tablets but, FFS, give us back our goddamn SD slots!

            1. Mikel
              Facepalm

              Re: Nice but...

              If you put an SD slot you have to pay Microsoft $8 - $25 per unit for the FAT/exFAT patent license, or be incompatible with most of the devices so formatted that will be inserted therein and suffer returns thereby, and/or suffer injunctions against the import of your product at the FTC. The hardware itself is $0.02, and the silicon and OS natively support it. Microsoft will use that license money to continue to try to kill Google in mobile, as that is what Microsoft allocates those revenues to. Therefore one of the conditions of Nexus devices is that they not have that slot hardware, because paying a competitor money to kill you is not an optimal strategy, and not delivering customer expectation that their camera or phone formatted exFAT uSDHC card will work in their Nexus tablet destroys brand value. SD is for Google a no-win scenario because Microsoft got in early and made their crappy disk format ubiquitous.

              Nexus devices are not ever going to have SD slots. They don't need them. Google has worked around that. It's not about Google forcing you into their cloud as a proprietary strategy, it's about Google not paying to have themselves killed because they are not stupid. Get over it.

        2. T. F. M. Reader

          Re: Nice but...

          "32GB is a lot of apps. How many blu-ray quality films is it, to make use of that Full HD screen?"

          One?

      3. dajames

        Re: Nice but...

        32GB is a lot of apps. You keep your personal data on Drive/Dropbox/your local NAS/whatever.

        At least that's how it's supposed to work in Googleland...

        Which might be fine if you're glued to your sofa, but if you ever leave home you will be at the mercy of cellular network providers who don't seem able to manage consistent coverage over even the well-populated parts of the country (and I'm talking about the UK here, the position is worse in more sparsely populated countries) and who charge an arm and a leg for the privilege of using it.

        How much would it actually cost to put 64GB rather than 32GB in one of these things, anyway? I'm guessing the parts would only be an extra tenner or so...

        1. chr0m4t1c
          Happy

          Re: Nice but...

          "How much would it actually cost to put 64GB rather than 32GB in one of these things, anyway? I'm guessing the parts would only be an extra tenner or so..."

          Unfortunately, you guess wrong.

          Because of the size of these things, the parts are packed pretty tight, so you don't make a product that can take 4x16gb and then leave three slots empty on the cheapest model; you make the device use a single memory module and change the capacity of the module.

          I haven't checked prices recently, but last year if your 16Gb module was £X, then a 32Gb module was about 2.2 x £X (let's call that £Y) and the 64Gb module was about 3x£Y (let's call that £Z). 128Gb modules were something like 6x£Z, but I think they're getting closer to 3.5x now so we might start seeing that capacity option this year.

          Also, I'd kind of expect that someone like Google might just have some data about what capacity tablets people are searching for - particularly in price comparisons - and that might make them tend towards particular capacities and price points. That's *my* guess for this thread :-)

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        In the land of perfect data connectivity perhaps...

        Meanwhile in large chunks of the real world mobile data coverage is full of holes, making streaming unreliable to impossible. Then there's the small matter of international roaming charges.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nice but...

      The more storage offered the better. High capacity built-in or SD Micro are always welcome but check out:

      Seagate Wireless Media 1 TB (Excellent device & works with everything - Android, iOS, Mac, PC & Chromebook).

      SanDisk Wireless Media Drive & Wireless Flash Drive are other options (just announced).

      Think Asus, who make the Nexus 7s, recently announced a new tablet which includes SD Micro to replace existing models.

      No shortage of choices.

    4. Jonathan 29

      Re: Nice but...

      You have to remember Google make virtually nothing on these tablets. They are supposed to be gateway drugs into selling you adverts and services. Giving you an SD card or more storage may encourage you to put content on the device that was not downloaded from the Play store or streamed to you from one pf their partners.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Nice but...

        "They are supposed to be gateway drugs into selling you adverts and services. "

        Which means people have a choice. Buy a Nexus 7 and accept that it is Google's spec, or buy better specified tablet which will be higher priced by virtue of the need to earn the margin at point of sale, and because the better spec costs more.

        An unfortunate side effect of selling the Nexus 7 at such low margin is that the economics of paid for repairs are questionable, making it essentially a disposable device. I'm not sure I like that aspect.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nice but...

      Still runs Malware

  2. sleepy

    What year is that?

    "And by the first half of this year almost one in two tablets sold will be Android."

    In my world the first half of this year is already gone.

    0 is almost 1. So I suppose it's true. But meaningless.

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

      Re: What year is that?

      0.98 is close to 1, as is 1.02

      Can you only deal with integers? Or maybe just whole numbers, if negative values are too tricky?

    2. D@v3

      Re: almost one in two

      I got a little hung up on that also.

      almost 1 in 2, is that like 4 in 10,

      or more like 49 in 100

      or even, like 499 in 1k?

      or even smaller margins than that?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It only just clicked

    They're always throwing that statistic of "soon tablets will be outselling PCs" etc, and it just clicked as to why. It isn't because people want tablets more or that they're far more popular. It's just that you don't need to upgrade your PC as much these days (or buy a new one)

    My PC is well over 5 years old now, and yet it can still play new games perfectly fine, as it gets older in the tooth I can upgrade the graphics card or the RAM, that doesn't count as a 'new PC' being sold.

    On the other hand 3 years ago I could have bought a top end tablet, it would have been sluggish on some apps, it would gradually slow down more and more and a year later a new tablet would come out with a far superior screen, better CPU and more RAM. Buy that and soon there will be more apps which bog it down, the next year comes and a new top end tablet comes out with even more RAM and an even faster CPU etc etc.

    Gains from PC hardware are rather small and generally aren't needed. If they are needed a lot of people will just upgrade their PC (or get a shop to do it for them) rather than buy a whole new machine, tablets don't really give you the option to upgrade, and the new versions of tablets have notable improvements over the older versions.

    Why am I rambling like this? Because people take the whole 'tablet outselling pc' thing too seriously. PC is still a far more popular platform, it's just that fewer people need to buy new PCs compared to those buying tablets.

    1. Volker Hett

      Re: It only just clicked

      All well and good, as long as you don't earn a living selling PCs.

    2. Mark .

      Re: It only just clicked

      Hear hear. Also there's the point that tablets are becoming much cheaper (indeed, even the £500 tablets, whilst they seem overpriced for what they do, are cheaper than what many laptops sell at). So it means people can upgrade them more often, or are more likely to have one per person whilst they might still share a PC. Long term I think tablets will sell more than PCs, but it's not because they're intrinsically better, or people want touch-only devices or anything else, it's simply they're way cheaper. It doesn't mean that PCs are going to disappear.

      I don't have a huge problem with Google showing that slide, it is a launch after all and they want to make their announcement sound as impressive as possible. But the media will run with stats like these, and continue to claim how "PCs are dying" (oddly in articles no doubt typed at a keyboard).

    3. Mikel

      Re: It only just clicked

      "PC is still a far more popular platform, it's just that fewer people..."

      Are buying PCs. People adore their PCs the most. They just BUY them less than tablets now. So PCs are fine. They're loved. They are not abandoned wretches. They'll sit there in the corner, turning grey with dust mostly unused, as we buy and embrace and use our new tablet and smartphone and converged devices. But they were our first love and we still hold them so dear that years from now we won't unplug them from the wall, drag them to the stoop and put them in the yard sale for $5 just in case we MIGHT have to pull up the quickbooks accounts from days gone by.

      Purely logic.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It only just clicked

      " It isn't because people want tablets more or that they're far more popular. It's just that...."

      ...the Nexus 7 is so flimsy and unreliable that Asus have to build two just to get one working through to the end of the miserable one year warranty.

      In this house, we have two. One was DOA on Xmas day, and the other has just been replaced due to failed motion sensors.

      1. Professor Clifton Shallot

        Re: It only just clicked

        ".the Nexus 7 is so flimsy and unreliable that Asus have to build two just to get one working through to the end of the miserable one year warranty"

        Is this the general experience of these, Reg readers?

        I was thinking of getting one, partly influenced by the impressive build quality of my Asus laptop, but if they have been built down to a price and won't stand up to the usual treatment a portable device gets then I won't bother.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: It only just clicked

          I'm typing this on a Nexus 7, and the build quality is excellent. I've not bothered getting a case for it, as the rubberised back doesn't mark easily and the screen feels solid. I've even accidentally sat on the devices couple of times , including occasions when it was in my back pocket. I weigh 97kg (not a lardarse, I lift weights a lot), and the Nexus coped with that.

        2. Luke McCarthy

          Re: It only just clicked

          There are several well-known build quality issues - screen lift (screen lifts up a few mm on left and creaks when pressed), temporary burn-in (visible "shadow" when switching to dark background), severe lagging when you run low on space due to cheap flash memory controller. When I first bought the Nexus 7 it was amazingly fast but now it lags like crazy all the time. Hoping that Asus fixed these issues with the new model.

          1. Luke McCarthy

            Re: It only just clicked

            Another one I forgot is audio glitching, which was really bad on release but was mostly fixed in subsequent updates, but the sound quality from the headphone jack is very poor (more noticeable with high quality headphones, can hear electrical interference noise like early on-board PC audio).

        3. Occams_Cat

          Re: It only just clicked

          I went through 2 of the 16GB N7's - each time I sent them back complaining that the system was as slow as molasses when you began to fill up the memory. Both times they replaced the glass and sent it back as 'fixed'. I don't think that they officially addressed that issue. Horrible.

      2. Slef

        Re: It only just clicked

        "In this house, we have two. One was DOA on Xmas day, and the other has just been replaced due to failed motion sensors."

        In my house I would have returned the doa one by dec 27th!!!

    5. rory dobson
      Happy

      Re: It only just clicked - YESS AND NO!

      Yes, PCs are lasting longer - at work what I used to depreciate and replace over 5 years now is re-lifed for at least one, maybe two more years. Processor power has overtaken software load in all but the top end games. And now I'm buying tablets too, but they live hard lives and I depreciate over 3 years...

      No, think about home users. At home I have four people, one "games" PC (5 yrs) and one media PC (3yrs) and one netbook and we all share them. Tablets - we're catching up, but counting phablets (5.1 inches must count right?) we've gone from zero to three in under a year, and I expect there'll be at least two more next Christmas. I think that's why the outsell will continue: PCs are predominantly shared *home* resources, whereas tablets are *personal*, and we're still playing catch up!

      Whatever, tablets should keep outselling until the inventories are more balanced - then we'll see!

    6. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It only just clicked

      Exactly. This is the real trouble Microsoft and Dell and such like face. For the time being (and maybe for a long time computers have peaked). A cheap supermarket no brand laptop bought 4 or 5 years ago is still perfectly adequate for most users. The same is happening to mobile. At retina quality display, quad core processing the only genuine improvement we're all waiting for is battery life.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: It only just clicked

        Not really. What we're REALLY waiting for is a new technology that produces cost effective, high res, bright colourful screens that you can see in full daylight, like those olde worlde paper magazines...

    7. Jay42

      Re: It only just clicked

      Have you checked the increased sales Chromebook devices?

      Main reason for the PC slow down is that most people can do most jobs they need on the web now such as Facebook / lightweight games / maps / email / Google docs / watch media. There are not so many people who need horsepower to do S/W development / video & photo editing / hardcore gaming. Previously the circa. 500US$ laptops used nearly exclusively for web browsing were the only choice.

  4. Paul Crawford Silver badge

    Note to laptop manufacturers...

    How come a small $269 fondle slab has better screen resolution than most laptops costing up to, and over, £1000?

    Really, it is hard to get a laptop beyond 768 lines now, and most over £1000 are still piss-poor at 1080 lines (Macbook retina and Chromebook pixel excepted). And you wonder why customers are unimpressed?

    1. jmk89
      Pint

      Re: Note to laptop manufacturers...

      This!

      1920x1200 is just nicer than 1920x1080, and is so hard to find laptops that do it, and the desktop monitors that do are twice the price of 1080p

    2. Mark .

      Re: Note to laptop manufacturers...

      I'm not sure why 1080 is piss poor, and 1200 is good - it's not that big a difference I agree that the obsession with 1366x768 is annoying, but Apple and Google are no exception, as you've got to pay for those high resolution devices. Samsung also do ones with similarly high resolutions.

      I wonder if the issue is cost - I mean, a Nexus 7 is cheap, but it only has a 7" screen. Consider how even 10" tablets are significantly more expensive.

      1. Andalou

        1080 vs 1200

        If you are drafting a royal birth announcement for foolscap there is not much difference in useability but for those targeting A4 the 120 pixels make a very surprising difference. Of course, affordable 1440 would be better. Indeed, for many uses, a 17" pivoted to portrait would be an acceptable option. (Sorry about the non-laptop aside.)

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          @ Andalou

          Your comment is confusing.

          Foolscap is a physically larger format than A4.

      2. Paul Crawford Silver badge

        @Mark.

        1080 is piss-poor at £1000+, but would be adequate at £350 for a basic laptop, after all you can get a 20" 1080 monitor for under £100.

        I think 1200 is the minimum for "serious" use of a computer, and that means not as a media consumption device but actual editing/coding/etc. As pointed out 1440 is better still, as is 1600, but the cost becomes a bit high (having said that, the Dell U3014 monitor is 30" and 2560 x 1600 lines and can be had for around £900).

        I don't particularly want "retina" resolution as I can't work at a viewing distance of 20cm or so to benefit from that, but I maintain that the current 768 lines is utter rubbish and that 1080 is piss-poor if you are paying £1000+ to avoid the 768 rubbish.

      3. btao

        Re: Note to laptop manufacturers...

        I have two Dell 1200x1920 26" monitors my laptop plugs into. It's amazing. Anything less at typical viewing distance for a computer or tablet is very grainy. You can't even read all fonts at 1080 resolution. It's relative to the size and viewing distance, just like TV's. Go ahead and debate the 4k next gens if you want. Unless you buy a 100" TV, 4k ultra resolution isn't going to look better.

        Oh, I got both my monitors for the same price as the nexus 7.

        Tablets are not the best tech out there, it's just the best you can take with you everywhere.

    3. Simon Barker

      Re: Note to laptop manufacturers...

      It's not entirely fair to compare a 7 inch screen to those that range between 10 to 18 inches and resolution isn't the only consideration of a display but I do see your point.

      Given most laptops would be running Windows you wouldn't necessarily want an ultra high resolution display as without adjusting the DPI scaling it can be harder to use.

      1. Bronek Kozicki
        Thumb Up

        Re: Note to laptop manufacturers...

        I think your mention of Windows is spot on here. I've just read this review of a 4K monitor and from this article it is obvious that many Windows applications, including those from respectable vendors like Adobe, do not deal well with DPI scaling (I do realize mention of Adobe and respectable in the same sentence might be arguable point for some, let's just skip over it).

        Since almost all laptops are sold with Windows only, this would mean that high resolution screens might potentially lead to serious customer disappointment, simply unable to see the icons and/or use application of choice without magnifying glass. Of course one might simply blame application vendors for not supporting DPI scaling well, rather than Microsoft, but the truth is that vendors often do not bother to add such a novelty feature unless they are forced to, because writing and maintaining GUI code is difficult enough with the APIs provided by Microsoft, without extra complexity of DPI scaling on top of it.

        So yes, Wintel block is driving PC platform to its (very slow!) demise, just like happened before with other monolithic blocks. I do hope alternative takes its place before too long.

        1. ROC
          FAIL

          Re: Note to laptop manufacturers...

          Higher densities used to be handled easily by WinXP. I am typing this now on an old Dell Latitude D800 that my brother-in-law cast off in my direction since it was dead. I thought to put a new motherboard from eBay in it, and sell it for some "mad money", but once it lit up with the new mobo, I was blown away by the 1920x1200 (16:10/8:5 aspect ratio) screen. I had no idea a 15" inch screen on a 10-year old notebook could have such a high resolution.

          The default density was a bit tiny for easy reading, but setting it 125% scaling helped it a lot. Most of the time though I run Linux (Mint 9 based on Ubuntu 10.04) on it, and that works quite well, too.

          Then I "go to work" on my employer's shiny new HP Elitebook 2560p, and its 12.5-inch 1366x768 screen feels so constrictive I have to use external monitors to get any use out of it. That replaced a Latitude D630 with 14-inch 1280x800 screen that I would go back to in a heartbeat for actual "mobile" use when no external monitors are readily available.

          What's annoying about the work PC situation is that the corporate decision-makers seem to be clueless as to what hinders/facilitates PC productivity. I could have gotten a 14-inch Elitebook (forget the exact model), but it also was restricted to 1366x768. However, my research on HP's site showed there was 1600x900 screen option, and if I got that, and dropped the useless (to me) optical drive, it would have knocked off $100 from the total price for a win-win situation for me and the company, right? NOT - that was not on the buying contract optons list, so no go, and I opted for the smaller HP to at least save my back if not my time. The big corps(e) perpetuate the problem with clueless contracts like that.

          I could do a lot of biz work from a tablet now (just not my essential Solaris server terminal sessions), and get higher res, but that is not so nice on smaller screens when the goal is to have as many windows as possible, and big as possible.

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