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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designerfx - Thursday, July 26, 2012 - link
USB OTG is supported - just not in stock. If you root you can indeed get apps to work out USB OTG.secretmanofagent - Thursday, July 26, 2012 - link
This has actually been talked about previously on Anandtech by one of the authors:http://www.anandtech.com/show/6061/mhl-and-usbotg-...
Impulses - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
He didn't test functionality once rooted tho, just speculated on it... Stickmount has since been proven to work and rooting Nexus devices is fairly easy, so this is an alternative for expandable storage for all but the most timid users.Sunburn74 - Thursday, July 26, 2012 - link
Yeah I bought this thing to use at work. It doesn't work with the open guest wifi. Really disappointing. I'm contemplating selling it off therefore.otherwise its great.
Sunburn74 - Thursday, July 26, 2012 - link
It will fail with numerous public guest wifi networkshttp://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?can...
Google has known about this issue and fails to correct it for 2 years now. Really painful. I own this item and cannot recommend it to anyone beacause it simply can't logon in many places I'd like to use it including airports, hospitals, etc etc
edwpang - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
Thank you for pointing out this issue.HJustin - Thursday, July 26, 2012 - link
No iTunes, no thanks.ssddaydream - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link
Troll much?If you need iTunes, then get AirSync and Doubletwist. It has been around for a quite a while. It works.
Or get an Apple product. They have iTunes.
robinthakur - Friday, August 31, 2012 - link
Both of those as well as iSyncr and Kies are awful,amateurish and buggy and make you yearn for an iDevice. I sold my Galaxy 3 because it's support for actually playing music and even getting it on the phone in the first place seemed to bring me back to 2001 before I got my first iPod. No triple tap to rewind on remote, no easy way to get to the music controls when the phone display is off (like double tapping home), dragging and dropping locking the phone during transfer made something which was previously so extraordinarily basic and straighforward the bane of my life. The couple of people in my team that still have Android devices I asked about it just said that they also carried iPods with them for music. At this point I got fed up and sold it, then went back to the iPhone 4S which might not have a big screen and such a 'modern' customisable OS, but beats it in every other meaningful way including syncing everything I need between multiple iDevices and my Desktops-easily and actually having the apps which I want available.tuxRoller - Thursday, July 26, 2012 - link
I question the implicit suggestion that an ios device provides a perfectly smooth ui experience. Forgetting the universal stutter of navigating to the search screen, the system will certainly slow down/stutter under load. IOS is the best out there currently but it could be improved as illustrated above.