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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prince2013 - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
what is your basis that the LTE model doesn't include a Qualcomm RF360 chip? How else could it work with all US carriers?Brian Klug - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
RF360 isn't a chip at all, for some reason I see this all over the place. Rather it's a portfolio of front end components from Qualcomm with a stacked PoP (RF this time) architecture. The core of the RF360 family is a CMOS Power Amplifier and switch, the rest of it is just packaging. For reasons I've discussed, MDM9x15 family doesn't need "RF360" family font ends (of which there's only one compatible, it's primarily going to start with MDM9x25) to do Band 13 and 17 coexistence, just the right discrete PAs and filters, and there's plenty of space for that in a tablet.-Brian
nofumble62 - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
I don't see any compelling reason to upgrade my current Nexus 7 though.Dribble - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
Current N7 is still working fine, will skip thing gen and get V3 next year.easp - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
Is there a discussion of battery life I missed, or is that not relevant for mobile devices any more?Death666Angel - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
You've missed the headline, where it says "mini". He didn't have time to do the battery life tests, which take up most of such a review, as a single charge takes 2 to 4 hours and discharging them takes 5 to 10 hours most of the time.Brian Klug - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
Battery life testing is ongoing at present, Anand is running those as I write this.-Brian
EnzoFX - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
This may have been brought out by the tests, but is the display panel wide gamut? Or at least as much as the iPad 3/4 are?Vigneshj - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
//dismayed why more OEMs don’t use the full encode capabilities of APQ8064 (20 Mbps H.264 High Profile) but that’s what it is by default on the new Nexus 7//Can any third party android app helps to overcome this?
Brian Klug - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
Yeah or editing build.prop after you've rooted it to change settings.-Brian