Nexus 7 (2013) - Mini Review
by Brian Klug on July 27, 2013 12:54 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Snapdragon
- Qualcomm
- Android
- Mobile
- APQ8064
- Nexus 7
- Android 4.3
The real highlight of the new Nexus 7 is of course the much higher resolution display. At 1920x1200 the Nexus 7 is now the highest resolution 7-inch tablet. This new IPS panel is made by JDI (Japan Display Inc) and boasts better viewing angles, 30 percent more gamut than the previous one, and of course better dot pitch of 323 PPI. Alongside that the new Nexus 7 also doesn’t have the always-on dynamic brightness and contrast (NVIDIA Prism / smartdimmer) that many including myself found frustrating with the original Nexus 7. On the new version the equivalent functions are enabled only during full screen video playback. This is a huge improvement since with the feature enabled on the previous Nexus 7 I always felt that greens were undersaturated and some dynamic range clipped.
I did a lot of asking around about how Google calibrates its panels, and was told that in the case of the Nexus 7 there are two stages. The first is the calibration done by JDI on the panel at a high level, the second is an additional calibration at time of manufacture, per device. This sort of thing is relatively standard, but I’ve always been curious about what stages cost extra money – certainly it’s a baseline expectation for the panel supplier to supply a close-enough LUT, but getting Delta E even lower I’m told requires additional expenditure.
It turns out that the new Nexus 7 is actually very close to sRGB this time around, with overall gamut being just a bit bigger than the sRGB color space. In the GMB Delta-E and saturations Delta-E measures, arguably the two most relevant for color accuracy, the new Nexus 7 is second only to the iPad 4, and better than the iPad Mini in color accuracy, a significant step forwards from its predecessor.
The new Nexus 7 also goes very bright, up to 583 nits, with excellent contrast of 1273. This is again not achieved using any dynamic contrast cheating since those functions are thoughtfully disabled.
On the display side of things I’m very pleased with how far the Nexus 7 has come, and it’s obvious that display quality was a big focus for the 2013 model.
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hughlle - Sunday, July 28, 2013 - link
Not to mention my nexus ten has no option for LTE, so this solution is that i'm only allowed so much on my tablet and if i want something else i have to go back home and get it. Furthermore not all of us have the money or are willing to buy a seperate sim contract so that they can access cloud data on the move. I do not want to pay £7.50 a month so that i can access data that i could have on an sd card for free.Further more it makes absolutely no sense to refuse to allow SD cards when i can happily plug a flash drive into the usb socket. If they don't want us using additional flash memory, then why allow for the ability to use it via USB at all? It's comes off looking like they are happy for us to have additional local storage, but do not wish for us to have it in a convenient manner.
BrandoHD - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I currently live in one of those non-US market and I have a 32 GB 2012 N7 and a 16 GB N4, the N7 has 21 GB free and the N4 has 9 GB free, and I hear every song or watch every movie that I want to hear/watch, through the use of the cloud, what you have there with non-expandable storage is a personal preference issue, it would do you well to remember that and not to create an issue for those in the so-called non-US markets.So the decision to not use expandable storage is not wrong, it is something you should get used too
Broo2 - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
One of the reasons Google is going away from SD expansion is that it confuses a majority of the populace. Most users need to have Gigabytes translated to a number of songs/photos/movies and cannot grasp the difference between internal and external (removable) storage. Google now needs to appeal to the iPhone mentality people (reminds me of the iPhone vs EVO video from a while back).I personally have about 30GB of (cherry-picked) music and I may choose 8-10 favorite albums and 200-300 favorite songs that i will listen to on a regular basis- which gives me about 20hrs of continious music in 5GB of 320kpps MP3s (or 12GB of FLAC).
...or I can use Spotify/Pandora/Mog/Rdio/Google and listen to 95% of all my music + new music that sometimes can catch on.
jcompagner - Sunday, July 28, 2013 - link
i find it always weird that "it confuses ta majority of the population"huh? which majority is that?
I never confused me, it never confused my people around me (even the not so tech savvy persons)
Also many of use are used to laptop/desktops that has "c" and "d" drives and so on (multiply drives)
thats how i see external storage, its just an extra "d" drive..
Kidster3001 - Friday, August 9, 2013 - link
There is no exapandable Memory on any mobile device.phillyry - Monday, July 29, 2013 - link
Agreed.At least the Nexus was bumped up to 16GB, 32GB from 8GB, 16GB but especially with the prices you're paying for a full sized iPad, you should be getting at least 32GB - it's just way to easy to fill that bad boy up.
32GB on a $229 model, on the other hand, maybe not so realistic but we can dream.
hrrmph - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
You nailed it: It's a nice upgrade, but, it definitely needs a Micro-SDXC slot, removable battery, and WiFi-AC to fix the most fundamental limitations that remain.fokka - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
you will never see a removable battery in a mainstream tablet. i'm sorry, but that's just the truth, as it seems.feteru - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
You're forgetting this is a $230 tablet that needs to stay light and thin somehow. As long as they continue to improve internal storage and make the connectivity better, I don't really have a problem with it on a tablet. And if you're so serious about having all of your music, get a real audio player like a RWA iMod or an HM801.Bob Todd - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
It's a *budget* tablet, get over the lack of AC. If the $400+ Nexus 10 refresh doesn't have AC wifi then you can bitch all you want. And as someone who's grown old while waiting to copy large amounts of data to a 64GB microSDXC card (< 15MB/s writes)...they aren't exactly the most amazing option for large data storage. Ideally all android tablets would have both microSDXC and USB OTG, but for my personal tablet if I have to choose one I'll got with OTG since the micro cards are just too damn slow. And asking for a removable battery in a mainstream tablet is just asinine. It isn't hurting anyone's sales because you and one other guy in Botswana are the only ones demanding that feature. The rest of the world realizes that if you have to carry some large(ish) battery around with you it might as well charge all of your devices (go to Amazon and type "Anker").