The Google Nexus 7 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on July 26, 2012 11:35 AM ESTBattery Life
The Nexus 7 has an integrated 16Wh battery, which despite its size delivers extremely good battery life. Our WiFi browsing test saw the Nexus 7 deliver 9 hours of battery life on a single charge, that's roughly half an hour less than the new iPad.
The Kindle Fire comparison is even more impressive - the Nexus 7 outlasts the Fire in this test by nearly 70%.
Battery life while playing back locally stored video is just as impressive. Here the Nexus 7 clocked in at over 10.5 hours on a single charge, 82% longer than the Kindle Fire. Of course with only 8GB of local storage you're going to be forced to stream a lot of content to the Nexus 7, where it will get worse battery life.
Our 3D gaming battery life test shows how bad things can get on the Nexus 7 if you really stress the SoC and display: 4.08 hours. This is actually the only test where the Kindle Fire does better on battery. Do keep in mind that the Nexus 7 is technically doing more work (higher resolution and frame rate), which contributes to the delta in battery life here.
With 4 hours on the low end and 10.5 hours on the high end there's a pretty wide dynamic range for battery life on the Nexus 7. Keep that in mind because depending on your usage model you may end up closer to the lower end of that spectrum than you'd otherwise think. The big problem is without tons of local storage, you're going to end up relying on WiFi for content streaming needs a lot more than you would otherwise - which does have a tangible impact on battery life.
The Nexus 7 does take a good amount of time to charge its relatively small battery using the supplied 10W (5V, 2A) charger:
You can expect a full charge to take 3.35 hours, and about 3 hours to hit 90%.
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Death666Angel - Saturday, July 28, 2012 - link
My Chinese tablet and my SGS2 have Wifi set to always on and there is nearly no battery drainage. My SGS2 has standby time of over 5 days with Wifi on and occasional talks. My tablet has standby for over 2 days and I have never gotten it from 100% to <5% battery in a single day so far.Wifi is quite tame these days, I don't see any reason to not have it on all the time.
sjvarley - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
"the limited NAND capacity prevents the Nexus 7 from being home to more than a single full length movie"Really?
If you need 8GB to store a full length movie on a tablet, then you're using the wrong codec.
tipoo - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
Yeah, on a 7" screen a 700MB rip should look fine.ssddaydream - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
I like to use uncompressed MKV.One of the things I would love if Anantech looked at was ability for the tablet to decode various vidoeos.
For example, I've had some trouble playing h264 1080p .MOV files smoothly (it was pretty bad, actually), but I haven't messed with it much yet. I'm confident that a good codec for 1080p content should scale the Nexus 7 display properly and still provide fluid playback.
Death666Angel - Saturday, July 28, 2012 - link
Since the SoC is strong enough to play back anything I throw at it from my normal TV media station, why I should I have to re-encode it for storage sake when storage is about the cheapest thing in the BOM of any tablet? Yes, I can do that, but I gain nothing from it except spend time when a few dollars worth of NAND could have gotten better results.And 700mb for 720p lasts you about 20 to 40 minutes, depending on how many audio streams you have and how much quality you want.
Torrijos - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
Hi,nice review, as always, but a couple of reviews back you had a plot about device efficiency (a quotient of battery life and battery size).
It would be nice to have a repository article following the evolution of power efficiency with OS updates and the influence of the different CPU architectures.
tukkas - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
how can the nexus 7 handle a shared device (i.e. multiple family members or guests) who don't want their gmail to necessarily be viewable by all? thank youHacp - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
Why only bronze? I say if you are looking to buy a tablet without data, the Nexus 7 is at the best price point . Anandtech used to be about price/performance. I'm dissapointed.will2 - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
An excellent review very thorough in important areas not covered by other reviewers, and with good insights comparing N7 with alternatives.However I think your verdict should list more negatives than limited unexpandable storage. To my mind another serious limitation of the hardware is lack of HDMI out.
I seek a small tablet (with enough memory to hold a reasonable selection of films) I can take around the home and plug into any TV to view, or likewise watch the films at a friends home. I want a tablet to be more multifunction, so when at the bedside it can be both both monitor CCTV and be used as an Alarm Clock Radio as it almost certainly has a FM radio in the same Broadcom chip for the WiFi & BT. Adding HDMI Out, be it via discrete HDMI socket, or cheap USB/MHL solution, and making available the embedded FM Radio, adds neglible cost to the product and makes it more widely useful.
TareX - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
Then you don't want a $199 tablet.