ASUS Google Nexus 7 Android Jellybean 4.1 7" Tablet Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
2,249 words · ~11 min read
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welcome to my unboxing and first look at the tablet that the entire internets are
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excited about this is the Nexus 7 from Google and ASUS it's a joint project you
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can see The Branding is sort of clever there's a picture of a tablet which also
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happens to be sort of in the shape of a seven which corresponds to the diagonal
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size of the screen it is a 7-in tablet includes a Tegra 3 processor running at
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1.3 GHz remember that's four high power
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cores plus one low power core for that particular processor and a powerful GPU
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it comes in 8 gig or 16 gig models and
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there's a few things here that we should probably talk about really quick so it's
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completely ready for Jelly Bean which is Android 4.1 which includes a lot of UI
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tweaks as well as a few other cool things so Nexus 7 runs the latest
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version of Android comes with all the Google apps you love check Gmail brows
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at the web with chrome so the browser that we found on pre editions of Android
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is going to be gone and with it flash support so we're going to be using
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Chrome on our tablets from now on watch videos from YouTube and chat face to
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face so it has a front-facing camera only no rear-facing camera it is a 1.2
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megapixel camera and honestly at the price points that these tablets are
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coming in at some sacrifices did have to be made so it's $1.99 for an 8 gig and
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about $2.49 remember these are USD prices so your mileage may vary um $249
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for a 16 gig there are no higher capacity versions of available at this
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time and that is the only difference between the two capacities is just the
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capacity so Google Play is their well what they've upated the market branding
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too so there's a lot of different stuff in there now including songs books
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movies and as well as apps and games full-fledge Android tablet powerful quad
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core processor front face vvor 7 in HD so that's an IPS that is an IPS display
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which means you're going to get a very decent viewing angle and what's cool
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about it is the fact that it is full HD so it is 1280 by 800 which means you can
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watch 720p video in full screen and it
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will be full resolution on this particular tablet and the other really
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cool thing about that is because of the fact that it is in a 7in form factor it
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has extremely high pixel density which you know if you have used a retina
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display from Apple you're going to be familiar with already is much less
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fatiguing on the eyes and makes text look just infinitely better I've
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actually I've taken it out already prior to the unboxing and I've played around with the a little bit and I'm very very
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impressed love the screen love the responsiveness love the accuracy so it's
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got a 10-point multi-touch which is about as much as any sort of normal
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person would need not that I'm saying that if you have six fingers on each
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hand that's a problem it's just that um you know you might want to use only 10
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of them at a given time when you're working on a tablet um you know what
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moving right along uh let's have a look at the physicality of the unit so
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there's a USB port here and what's cool about this is it supports USB on the go
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which means that it can not only act as a in device mode but also in host mode
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so if you were to plug a keyboard for example into it then it can it can you
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can use that okay it will act as the the tablet will act as a host instead of the
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other way around so you can actually pair it with the keyboard and use a
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keyboard on the device which is very very cool there's your headphone jack
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which is pretty standard moving right along not a whole lot not a whole lot
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there's a light sensor on it somewhere ah there it is as well well as the front facing camera there's your power there's
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your volume rocker the back is very nice I'm actually not a big fan of metal
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backs on tablets because they tend to get grimy looking uh they tend to get
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stained very easily they're heavier they're just they're cold or they're too
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hot they're just not that comfortable so this is a rubberized backing which has a
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bit of a grippy texture to it that's very very nice now I loved the
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Blackberry playbook for a couple of reasons it was super Snappy great as a
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little web browsing device and I thought the form factor was just perfect so as
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you guys can probably imagine the Nexus 7 definitely floats my boat in much the
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same way I just want to have a quick look at what's included so you got your warranty card as well as a quick start
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guide uh charging whoops charging cable as well as a charger so not a huge
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accessory package by any stretch of the imagination so let's get logged in here
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and let's have a look at some of the differences this is one of my
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favorite tablet benchmarks for a couple of reasons because it just seems to to
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absolutely destroy every tablet and other mobile device that I have ever had
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the pleasure of encountering so here I've got my other two favorite tablets
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uh the iPad 2 I don't have an iPad 3 unfortunately I wish I could uh talk
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about that one a little bit and then I've also got a Galaxy Tab 10.1 so this
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is running the older honeycomb version
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of Android so give me 2 seconds and I'm going to get this page loaded up so the
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screen doesn't have quite the Vibrance that uh oh sorry this one actually has
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flash on it so the video is even been trying to play it doesn't have quite the
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Vibrance of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and not
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quite the brightness of the iPad too but it's very very passable and it's a
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smaller screen anyway so um actually
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that doesn't really make a difference at all okay this is something that just
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absolutely tanks the performance of every mobile
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browser that I've had the displeasure of using trying to view YouTube comments
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which as you guys can imagine is something that I do try to do on tablet
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so I want you guys to just have a quick look at what the fluidity is like so yes
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the UI on the Nexus 7 is absolutely
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gorgeous and amazing and so smooth and
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looks like it decided to do this a slightly different way for me here give
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me a sec guys oops so this is cool they
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have uh with the Chrome and YouTube app integration that they've done here this
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is this is absolutely awesome so instead of clicking on this and having it open
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in Chrome it actually opens in the YouTube app which is so much smoother
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compared to trying to navigate in Chrome for things like reading comments and
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seeing related videos and seeing the information all you do is rotate it and
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it goes ahead and puts it in I'm just going to turn that down a little bit
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there we go goes ahead and puts it in uh video viewing mode for you rotation is
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pretty smooth however for the sake of showing you guys what I think of the
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performance here this is cool too when you're clicking on something small it's
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really neat it pops it up for you so you can make sure you click the right thing
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so we're going to go ahead and view the comments of that video in much the same
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way that we're looking at them on the other tablets so I'll show you guys how
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this tanks the performance of pretty much every tablet ever and I quite can't
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quite figure out why but the Nexus 7 does better than so the iPad in spite of
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its normal smoothness you can see legs quite a bit behind when I'm trying to
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browse comments and just has sort of glitches and the loading same thing with
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older Android tablets you can see it's very very glitchy trying to browse this
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for whatever reason uh it doesn't help when there are tons of comments on the
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video and this particular one has a few thousand comments so you can see it's
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actually not as bad as I've come to expect from Android tablets it's closer
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to the experience you have with the iPad 2 but with some of the UI tweaks that
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they've made I would never have to use this kind of an interface for it anyway
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which is very very refreshing tagra games run obviously
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better on the Nexus 7 you can see the older Tegra 2 is chopping up a little
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bit just watching this spaceship hover around and demolitioning whereas here
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I'm just going to brace myself so you can uh see the smoothness compared to
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the Galaxy Tab 10.1 well you'll have to take my word for it cuz apparently you
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can't see that at all and uh the lighting in here is absolutely terrible
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but whatever okay so we're going to do that play play the graphics also look
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better just due to the higher pixel density so you can see lots of aliasing
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and garbage on this one whereas here the line Looks a Lot smoother uh it's not
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because it's running at higher res it's just the uh the higher pixel density
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that's all yeah it looks so much sharper and
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runs way smoother you can see it start to chug as it tries to zoom in on the
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city here that is absolutely uh absolutely
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outstanding I mean none of this should really come as a surprise given that it
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is a Tegra 3 processor and that is better than a Tegra 2 but just the
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fluidity is uh is very very nice there's a few other tweaks that I really really
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like already about uh about the Nexus 7
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so one of them is the quick access to settings as well as the quick access
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here to your rotation lock um little
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things like that that make me really happy touchcreen is very very accurate
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and moving around Within the I mean it's
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just so lightning fast and smooth that
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it's just makes everything else look like a joke um that we've seen in the
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past let's just go back let's go back to
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home oh let's load up the NVIDIA glow ball demo cuz who doesn't love the glow
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ball demo I haven't actually seen it in
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person before because this is the first time I've had access to a uh to a Tegra
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3 Tablet cool I don't know how to use it
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or anything oh you tilt it okay I guess that makes sense we glow ball okay this
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is sort of less fun than I thought it was going to be boom you knock things
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over with physics okay sorry I'm done now so I think that pretty much wraps it
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up I don't know how much else there is for me to say about it other than um so
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far I'm really impressed it basically is everything that it sounds like it is
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it's a Tegra 3 tablet at a $1.99 price point for the 8
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gig version you don't get any SD expansion so that's maybe one thing that
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some people won like about it oh yeah there's a speaker on the back right under the ASUS logo that bar right there
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uh so yeah it's a it's a it's a it's a 199 Tegra 3 tablet that has a very nice
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screen good form factor great build quality and I'm overall very impressed
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and is my camera really not focusing like this entire
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time oh it's just the contrast okay well the screen looks a lot better than it
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does in my pathetic camera so I'm sorry for that but thank you for checking out
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my unboxing and first look at the Nexus 7 don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech
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tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos and don't forget
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to subscribe to my ncixcom channel as well or to the ncixcom channel as well
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where I'll be doing a full proper rundown of this new tablet and the new
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OS that goes with