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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charleski - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
Great review Brian. I'm just interested to know where you got the info on the APQ8064–1AA having Krait 300 cores. Searching for that part no just turns up references to your tweet and this article.Brian Klug - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
There's no public disclosure I can link you to about it, however internal documentation and confirmation I got from PR acknowledge that APQ8064-1-AA (or APQ8064-1AA as I wrote it for simplicity reasons) is 4xKrait 300 at 1.5 GHz with DDR3L support.-Brian
karasaj - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
So my local best buys were selling them early and I picked one up last night :D I haven't played with it much but this mini review makes me extremely glad that I did!MarcVenice - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
Great review. I don't see how some reviewers don't think this isn't an epic tablet. I mean, it's beating the iPad Mini on all fronts, and it will probably be equal to the new iPad Mini, except for build quality, but the new iPad Mini will cost an arm and a leg compared to the Nexus 7 (2013).Compared to most other 7" android tablets, it's simply a steal? I'm not sure if I want to upgrade from my current Nexus 7, but if I didn't have one yet, I definitely would.
kascollet - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
This new Nexus is great, for sure, but honestly, I don't see myself replacing my ipad Mini with it for one unique reason : the size of the screen. Even if the low ppi screen of the Mini is not that great, it's still way larger (30 square inches vs 22) and as I mainly use it to browse the web, it's a no brainer. I guess many customers feel the same when they see both devices side by side. Then there is the ecosystem, again immensely better on every iPad.I seriously hope Apple upgrades the Mini with modern and powerful components like Google just did with the Nexus, but whatever pieces they choose, any iPad with this 4:3 ratio screen is better to me than a 16:10 below 9" Android slate.
MarcVenice - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
Hmm yeah got me there, screen real estate is bigger on the mini, but I find that I mostly use the tablet for reading or watching shows/movies, and then it's not a problem at all, in fact it's a plus since with 4:3 you get the black bars.As for eco-system, well, since I mostly read / watch shows, I'm not to bothered. But it should also be picking up, with ipad sales slowing down, and android-tablets grabbing a larger marketpercentage, should mean more devs making android tablet-apps. Of course the fact that there's so many resolutions out there will make it harder (and slower going).
doobydoo - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
The Nexus loses out on just about every single on screen GPU benchmark. Yes, I know this is partly because it has to push more pixels but it DOES have to push more pixels so real world FPS is much slower on this Nexus 7 - even though it's 9 months newer.I have no idea why you think it wins in every category, and it also has a smaller screen despite being larger in terms of volume, and we've yet to compare battery life.
nerd1 - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
I don't think 7.9" 1024*768 screen is any better than 7.1" 1920*1200 screen to browse the web.kascollet - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
To each his own of course, by size matters very much to me.The iPad Mini is not much bigger than the N7, but the screen is.
http://goodereader.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/uploads/i...
guidryp - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
I definitely prefer the iPad Mini screen size/aspect.But owning neither today, there is no way I could consider buying a Mini, with the new Nexus 7 on the market, that is pretty much better in every other way.
If Mini Retina fails to show up this Fall, I see Apple losing a lot more tablet market share.