The Google Nexus 7 tablet resets expectations of what an inexpensive tablet can and should be. Starting at $199, the Nexus 7 clearly guns for Amazon’s same-priced but lesser-quality Kindle Fire, which runs Amazon’s limited flavor of Android. Make no mistake: Of today’s 7-inch Android tablets, the Nexus 7 is the one to beat, and it is handily one of the best-executed Android tablets of any size you can buy. In some ways, that’s not saying much; for as much as it does well—it has a tremendous 10-plus-hour battery life, and it produces reasonably clear text and accurate colors—the Nexus 7 stumbles by leaving out an expansion slot. You need to step up to the 16GB $249 version for the Nexus 7 to make a sensible purchase, and even then you’ll be settling for something short of the ideal tablet.
The lack of a memory card slot hobbles Google’s shiny new tablet before you can even get moved in and set up. Android has always held a big advantage over Apple’s iOS in its ability to expand on-board storage via a memory card; in fact, this is something that every tablet competing with the Nexus 7 except the Amazon Kindle Fire (and Apple’s iPad, natch) has. The Kindle Fire has taken lots of flack for providing a baseline model with only 8GB of storage and no room to grow.
It’s not clear why Google opted to leave out the card slot. Cutting it may be as much about Google’s live-in-the-cloud philosophy and services as it is a cost-cutting measure adopted by Google and Nexus 7 manufacturer Asus in order to meet an aggressive price. If Google’s emphasis on cloud services is indeed behind this choice—and likely that’s the case, given that Google bills the Nexus 7 as being “Made for Google Play”—that frankly makes Google’s despotism no better than Apple’s decision to keep users in its walled garden or Amazon’s decision to force us to use its cloud services with the Kindle Fire. Amazon, too, tried to spin its minimal on-board storage by saying that you could store media in, and stream content from, its cloud services. That approach is not rooted in consumers’ real-world usage patterns, and it doesn’t account for the vagaries of Wi-Fi availability and bandwidth. Consumers crave offline storage; we’re still away from wireless connections often enough for local storage to matter. No one wants to have to keep managing their content on and off the tablet just to work around a space limitation.
Given that we’re seven months on from when Amazon’s first-generation Kindle Fire was introduced, I’m surprised and disappointed that Google didn’t push the default memory on the Nexus 7 to 16GB in the $199 model. Now that would have gotten our collective attention—and rightly so. With the Nexus 7 you’re going to be downloading movies and television shows in high-definition, using apps optimized for high-definition displays, and loading up your high-resolution images for use in the gallery; and with all that activity, 8GB just won’t go very far. That amount of storage, with only 5.62GB of user-accessible space when you start the tablet for the first time—is too parsimonious to make the Nexus 7 a tablet I can recommend whole-heartedly. That’s unfortunate, because the Nexus 7 actually gets a lot right—far more than most competing Android machines.
The lack of a memory card slot hobbles Google’s shiny new tablet before you can even get moved in and set up. Android has always held a big advantage over Apple’s iOS in its ability to expand on-board storage via a memory card; in fact, this is something that every tablet competing with the Nexus 7 except the Amazon Kindle Fire (and Apple’s iPad, natch) has. The Kindle Fire has taken lots of flack for providing a baseline model with only 8GB of storage and no room to grow.
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