Google Nexus 7 Tablet - Unboxing & Review

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys Mike here the Detroit Bard with a look at the new Google Nexus 7 tablet from assus this is running Android 4.1 or Jelly Bean and is the reference design for the latest and greatest Android software so this is the pure Android experience so let's unbox this thing take a look around the hardware and see what's new with the new software now the Nexus 7 tablet is available in two sizes 8 gig and 16 gig 8 gig 199 16 gig 2 49 so that's pretty low this is not available in a cellular version so you can't get 4G or 3G this is just a Wi-Fi device take a look around the Box you have that seven formed by the shape of the Nexus 7 itself Nexus 7 on the side on the back you see made for Google Play full-fledged Android tablet so this is the pure Android experience you can see some of the apps they're highlighting there including the fact that this is the first Android device to ship with chrome by default so Chrome is the default browser it's coming model of beta and is now the preferred browser on the Nexus 7 now in terms of specs we have a 1.3 GHz quad core tegra3 processor with a 12 core GPU we also have 1 gig of internal Ram this does not have a built-in SD card slot so you either get 8 gig or 16 gig so decide when you buy now this also includes NFC technology as well as an accelerometer GPS magnetometer gyroscope this also has a 7in screen with a resolution of 1280 by 800 that's an HD display uh and gives you a PPI of 216 so it's not quite rent a display so let's go ahead and crack this open so we got two pieces of tape here so it's so nice they taped it twice pop it open and there it is so we have a little tab here to lift it up we'll set that aside for just a moment take a look to see what's inside this package here so we get another box so here we have some lerer here a quick start guide and our warranty information let's briefly look at that quick start guide see if there's anything interesting there it doesn't really look like it so we'll set there the sign inside here we have our micro USB charging and syncing cable and on the other side we can find our wall adapter here you see it's assus branded and you can see the USB plugs in there now onto the tablet itself so we got a little tab here to lift up this envelope and slide it out or it's a little sticky here there we go now taking a close look around the hardware you can see on the back we have our Nexus branding on the bottom we have asus's branding as well as a speaker Grill this is a single speaker not a stereo speaker on the side we'll find our button so we have our sleep wake power button as well as our volume rocker down here we'll find our headphone jack as well as a micro USB connector for charging and adding data on the side we'll find our uh four pins these are electrical connections for connecting accessories we also have two microphones one here another one up here that's so if you're handling this in either portrait or landscape mode you may be covering at least one of the microphones so at least one is free at any given time now the back is not removable it's actually made out of this sort of rubbery texture so it actually feels very nice to handle very grippable if you look very closely it actually has these kind of perforations which actually remind me of maybe a golf ball or the perforations on a leather seat now the edge is made out of this hard plastic bezel so this is not metal or anything like that it's just a painted uh silver uh plastic up front we have an edgo edge glass panel which is Corine Gorilla Glass up here we'll find our only camera on this device which is a 1.2 megapixel camera along with an ambient light sensor just next to that now the camera actually does not have a dedicated app so you can't use this as a still shooter basically it's there to be used with apps such as Skype now you'll find no other buttons here so no backlit Android buttons instead they appear on the screen itself now my next step is to boot up and set it up for the first time so I'm just going to hold the power button okay all right so we have our welcome screen and we can select our language it knows I'm in the United States so let's click play we're going to select my Wi-Fi so that's my time capsule I just need to enter in my password hi Detroit Borg enter your passord password for Mikela gmail.com so now it's signing into my Google account so it should be able to transfer all my account information such as calendaring address book bookmarks that sort of thing so now it's going to ask me if I want to back up and restore from my existing Google account for now I don't want to do that I want to show you the stock interface and yes I would like to use Google location services just a sec setup is complete and let's move on now once you've activated your Nexus 7 Google will deposit $25 in your Google Play account so you can start spending it on apps books movies music magazines and everything else available in the Play Store now taking a look through the software starting with the lock screen on the lock screen you can swipe this icon left right or down to unlock the device or you can swipe up to get right to Google search what's the weather like in San Francisco it's 69° and clear in San Francisco here's the forecast for the next few days okay so we get that new enhanced voice search as well as Google now so if we go back here we can take a look at Google Now Google Now is essentially an aggregator of information uh based on your search history location account information uh so you'll see information appear here in these cards and it's sort of intuitive it knows what information you may need so for example if you show up at a movie theater and you've done a search for recent listings of The Dark Night it will show you moving listings and give you the option to purchase tickets that sort of thing now once you get back to the home screen you can get to Google now just by tapping and holding and swiping up on the home button takes you right to where you last left off and you can do searches like how old is President Barack Obama Barack Obama is 50 years old how tall is Mount Everest Mount Everest is 29,029 ft tall play artist Coldplay playing request who directed Fargo Fargo was directed by Ethan Cohen and others so you can see you can do quite a few things with the new Google search and the voice sounds very natural now the Nexus 7 tablet comes with five home screens which you can customize by adding additional apps or widgets now the main home screen has the my library widget which is an a widget that shows you all of your library information such as your books your music your movies magazines and all you have to do is tap on any one of them to get right to them so for example that's my Coldplay album and all of this is recent activity so anything that you've looked at recently will appear in this Library widget we also have some Play Store recommendation widgets up here on or to the right of that home screen and you can remove these if you want just by tapping and holding them and taking them up to delete we'll leave them for now now down below in the dock we can find some of our standard Google Apps as well so we have a folder full of apps including Google Chrome which is the new default browser as well as Maps Google+ Gmail YouTube Earth talk currents which is updated with Android 4.1 people gallery and calendar all these will have been uh transferred from your Google account all of your information will have automatically been transferred to those uh apps we also have our Google Play bookstore or our Google Play library so here a Google books library which is where we can find all of our books so if you purchase books through Google Play you can see them they will automatically download here and you can read them right away obviously this is one of the main use cases for the 7-in tablet is for reading so of course they've also given us a manual for the new tablet so instead of having a printed manual you get a full electronic manual we also have Google magazine which launched with Android 4.1 as well so if you subscribe to magazines they will appear in this app and you can tap on them and start reading them we also have Google movies and they've included a copy of Transformer Dark of the Moon so this will Auto Al load as soon as you boot up your device for the first time to this soal alien Civil War well the other side wanted to we also have Google play music uh which is where you can access your uh music library either from the cloud or locally so for example we have our Coldplay album here to click play and we're all good to go and lastly we have our Google Play Store for buying apps music movies and everything you can think of right from one location now down below we also have our three main Android buttons including back home and recent apps if we tap recent apps you can see everything we last launched we could swipe them out of the way if we want to close them or tap them to bring them forward and we also have Google search which is always omnipresent on any home screen so we can do search right from here where is the nearest for dealership getting directions now at the top of the screen we will find our clock battery indicator as well as Wi-Fi status and we have our badges our notification badges so we can see that we have uh music playing in the background we also have some new email notifications now if you had Instagram Facebook Google+ you'd see all of that appear as badges up here and you can swipe down to get to them so you can see all of our notifications including a little widget here to play our music and we have our email notifications here now you can expand this just by bringing two fingers and swiping down you can jump right to that app just by tapping on it now the drop- down menu also has a screen lock rotation toggle here so if you don't want the screen to automatically reposition from portrait to lens landcape mode so for example if you're reading a book and you don't want it to go to landscape mode when you lie on your side that's one way of quickly locking the rotation you also have quick access to your settings if you drop down down here you can also see you can clear out all of your notifications now in order to see all of our apps all we have to do is tap the app drawer and we can see all of them now you can see the standard Suite of Google Apps many of which are already on the home screens some of them that are not on the home screens include uh Google Wallet which is part of the NFC technology built into the back of this device so uh NFC work works with uh proximity so if you have an NFC payment device or another device that uses NFC to transfer information basically you bring them close to this area and it transfers the information uh securely so that's great for payment uh now in terms of other apps we also have current which is sort of a news aggregator this allows you to subscribe to certain websites uh so you can receive their information in sort of a tablet or a mobile device friendly format so for example if we go to the verb here you can see it's formatted for this display so you can see text fills the screen images fill the screen and you don't need a pinch and zoom to read it now to add additional apps all you have to do is tap and hold on them and bring them to any of the home screens and drop them now one of the great things about Android 4.1 is things will now get out of the way if you want to drop them on your home screen they used used to have to move them around in order for them to fit on now you can also drag and drop them up to remove to delete them this also works with widgets so for example we can drop our let's see calendaring widget here we can drop it right here and you can see it resizes to fit between these two widgets now you can also resize them by tapping and holding them and dragging them around if you don't want them just tap and hold them and take them up to remove now the other big change with Android 4.1 is under the hood which is called Project Butter which is designed essentially to speed up the perceptual performance of Android 4.1 so you get higher frame rates uh so transitions are much smoother uh touch events are much more accurate so you get better touchs screen sensitivity basically the whole system uh now prioritizes or better prioritizes rendering of images on the screen so definitely it feels a lot quicker and a lot smoother now one of the interesting things here is that the home screens do not have landscape mode so you can't rotate this into landscape mode uh but certain apps certainly do work in landscape mode obviously such as the movie app and you can see that the icons will reposition themselves to the corresponding location now Project Butter also shows itself when you're rotating the device around so you can see the transitions from landscape to portrait mode are pretty smooth and pretty quick now like the iPad the Nexus 7 also has a magnet which interacts with smart covers so I have a magnet here which we can test out so if you wave in the right spot you can see it turns it off or wakes it up this is a really strong magnet so I didn't even have to touch the device for it to work but you get the idea there are thirdparty cases out there right now which you can purchase on Amazon uh which work with that feature and I will have one for review in the future video Android 4.1 also brings predictive text so it's able to predict what the next word might be so for example if I were to type it was it predicted that a dark and stormy night so it's able to predict some text so you spend less time poking away at the keyboard Android 4 4.1 also has offline Voice to Text dictation I've turned off my Wi-Fi and you can go ahead and speak it was a dark and stormy night period now just to give you some perspective on the size of the Nexus 7 versus the iPad obviously the iPad is a near 10-in device so it's quite a bit larger than the 7-in uh tablet so the 7-in tablet is ideal for portability certainly better than an iPad in terms of carrying this around you can actually fit this in a pocket if you have a really large AR pocket or inside a coat pocket this is better suited for reading books because it's lighter weight and can be held in one hand pretty comfortably now in terms of battery performance this does have a 4325 milliamp battery which is good for about 9 hours of video play ma or 10 hours of web browsing or 10 hours of e reading or 300 hours on standby now in conclusion I'm very impressed by the Nexus 7 tablet especially at 199 you get some impressive internal specs and a nice sharp High quality screen now combine that with the smoothness of Android 4.1 and killer features from Google such as Google Now and the new and improved voice search and you have the best 7-in tablet money can buy right now so that's going to do for me guys in this video thanks for watching and I'll see you again in the next onewhat's up guys Mike here the Detroit Bard with a look at the new Google Nexus 7 tablet from assus this is running Android 4.1 or Jelly Bean and is the reference design for the latest and greatest Android software so this is the pure Android experience so let's unbox this thing take a look around the hardware and see what's new with the new software now the Nexus 7 tablet is available in two sizes 8 gig and 16 gig 8 gig 199 16 gig 2 49 so that's pretty low this is not available in a cellular version so you can't get 4G or 3G this is just a Wi-Fi device take a look around the Box you have that seven formed by the shape of the Nexus 7 itself Nexus 7 on the side on the back you see made for Google Play full-fledged Android tablet so this is the pure Android experience you can see some of the apps they're highlighting there including the fact that this is the first Android device to ship with chrome by default so Chrome is the default browser it's coming model of beta and is now the preferred browser on the Nexus 7 now in terms of specs we have a 1.3 GHz quad core tegra3 processor with a 12 core GPU we also have 1 gig of internal Ram this does not have a built-in SD card slot so you either get 8 gig or 16 gig so decide when you buy now this also includes NFC technology as well as an accelerometer GPS magnetometer gyroscope this also has a 7in screen with a resolution of 1280 by 800 that's an HD display uh and gives you a PPI of 216 so it's not quite rent a display so let's go ahead and crack this open so we got two pieces of tape here so it's so nice they taped it twice pop it open and there it is so we have a little tab here to lift it up we'll set that aside for just a moment take a look to see what's inside this package here so we get another box so here we have some lerer here a quick start guide and our warranty information let's briefly look at that quick start guide see if there's anything interesting there it doesn't really look like it so we'll set there the sign inside here we have our micro USB charging and syncing cable and on the other side we can find our wall adapter here you see it's assus branded and you can see the USB plugs in there now onto the tablet itself so we got a little tab here to lift up this envelope and slide it out or it's a little sticky here there we go now taking a close look around the hardware you can see on the back we have our Nexus branding on the bottom we have asus's branding as well as a speaker Grill this is a single speaker not a stereo speaker on the side we'll find our button so we have our sleep wake power button as well as our volume rocker down here we'll find our headphone jack as well as a micro USB connector for charging and adding data on the side we'll find our uh four pins these are electrical connections for connecting accessories we also have two microphones one here another one up here that's so if you're handling this in either portrait or landscape mode you may be covering at least one of the microphones so at least one is free at any given time now the back is not removable it's actually made out of this sort of rubbery texture so it actually feels very nice to handle very grippable if you look very closely it actually has these kind of perforations which actually remind me of maybe a golf ball or the perforations on a leather seat now the edge is made out of this hard plastic bezel so this is not metal or anything like that it's just a painted uh silver uh plastic up front we have an edgo edge glass panel which is Corine Gorilla Glass up here we'll find our only camera on this device which is a 1.2 megapixel camera along with an ambient light sensor just next to that now the camera actually does not have a dedicated app so you can't use this as a still shooter basically it's there to be used with apps such as Skype now you'll find no other buttons here so no backlit Android buttons instead they appear on the screen itself now my next step is to boot up and set it up for the first time so I'm just going to hold the power button okay all right so we have our welcome screen and we can select our language it knows I'm in the United States so let's click play we're going to select my Wi-Fi so that's my time capsule I just need to enter in my password hi Detroit Borg enter your passord password for Mikela gmail.com so now it's signing into my Google account so it should be able to transfer all my account information such as calendaring address book bookmarks that sort of thing so now it's going to ask me if I want to back up and restore from my existing Google account for now I don't want to do that I want to show you the stock interface and yes I would like to use Google location services just a sec setup is complete and let's move on now once you've activated your Nexus 7 Google will deposit $25 in your Google Play account so you can start spending it on apps books movies music magazines and everything else available in the Play Store now taking a look through the software starting with the lock screen on the lock screen you can swipe this icon left right or down to unlock the device or you can swipe up to get right to Google search what's the weather like in San Francisco it's 69° and clear in San Francisco here's the forecast for the next few days okay so we get that new enhanced voice search as well as Google now so if we go back here we can take a look at Google Now Google Now is essentially an aggregator of information uh based on your search history location account information uh so you'll see information appear here in these cards and it's sort of intuitive it knows what information you may need so for example if you show up at a movie theater and you've done a search for recent listings of The Dark Night it will show you moving listings and give you the option to purchase tickets that sort of thing now once you get back to the home screen you can get to Google now just by tapping and holding and swiping up on the home button takes you right to where you last left off and you can do searches like how old is President Barack Obama Barack Obama is 50 years old how tall is Mount Everest Mount Everest is 29,029 ft tall play artist Coldplay playing request who directed Fargo Fargo was directed by Ethan Cohen and others so you can see you can do quite a few things with the new Google search and the voice sounds very natural now the Nexus 7 tablet comes with five home screens which you can customize by adding additional apps or widgets now the main home screen has the my library widget which is an a widget that shows you all of your library information such as your books your music your movies magazines and all you have to do is tap on any one of them to get right to them so for example that's my Coldplay album and all of this is recent activity so anything that you've looked at recently will appear in this Library widget we also have some Play Store recommendation widgets up here on or to the right of that home screen and you can remove these if you want just by tapping and holding them and taking them up to delete we'll leave them for now now down below in the dock we can find some of our standard Google Apps as well so we have a folder full of apps including Google Chrome which is the new default browser as well as Maps Google+ Gmail YouTube Earth talk currents which is updated with Android 4.1 people gallery and calendar all these will have been uh transferred from your Google account all of your information will have automatically been transferred to those uh apps we also have our Google Play bookstore or our Google Play library so here a Google books library which is where we can find all of our books so if you purchase books through Google Play you can see them they will automatically download here and you can read them right away obviously this is one of the main use cases for the 7-in tablet is for reading so of course they've also given us a manual for the new tablet so instead of having a printed manual you get a full electronic manual we also have Google magazine which launched with Android 4.1 as well so if you subscribe to magazines they will appear in this app and you can tap on them and start reading them we also have Google movies and they've included a copy of Transformer Dark of the Moon so this will Auto Al load as soon as you boot up your device for the first time to this soal alien Civil War well the other side wanted to we also have Google play music uh which is where you can access your uh music library either from the cloud or locally so for example we have our Coldplay album here to click play and we're all good to go and lastly we have our Google Play Store for buying apps music movies and everything you can think of right from one location now down below we also have our three main Android buttons including back home and recent apps if we tap recent apps you can see everything we last launched we could swipe them out of the way if we want to close them or tap them to bring them forward and we also have Google search which is always omnipresent on any home screen so we can do search right from here where is the nearest for dealership getting directions now at the top of the screen we will find our clock battery indicator as well as Wi-Fi status and we have our badges our notification badges so we can see that we have uh music playing in the background we also have some new email notifications now if you had Instagram Facebook Google+ you'd see all of that appear as badges up here and you can swipe down to get to them so you can see all of our notifications including a little widget here to play our music and we have our email notifications here now you can expand this just by bringing two fingers and swiping down you can jump right to that app just by tapping on it now the drop- down menu also has a screen lock rotation toggle here so if you don't want the screen to automatically reposition from portrait to lens landcape mode so for example if you're reading a book and you don't want it to go to landscape mode when you lie on your side that's one way of quickly locking the rotation you also have quick access to your settings if you drop down down here you can also see you can clear out all of your notifications now in order to see all of our apps all we have to do is tap the app drawer and we can see all of them now you can see the standard Suite of Google Apps many of which are already on the home screens some of them that are not on the home screens include uh Google Wallet which is part of the NFC technology built into the back of this device so uh NFC work works with uh proximity so if you have an NFC payment device or another device that uses NFC to transfer information basically you bring them close to this area and it transfers the information uh securely so that's great for payment uh now in terms of other apps we also have current which is sort of a news aggregator this allows you to subscribe to certain websites uh so you can receive their information in sort of a tablet or a mobile device friendly format so for example if we go to the verb here you can see it's formatted for this display so you can see text fills the screen images fill the screen and you don't need a pinch and zoom to read it now to add additional apps all you have to do is tap and hold on them and bring them to any of the home screens and drop them now one of the great things about Android 4.1 is things will now get out of the way if you want to drop them on your home screen they used used to have to move them around in order for them to fit on now you can also drag and drop them up to remove to delete them this also works with widgets so for example we can drop our let's see calendaring widget here we can drop it right here and you can see it resizes to fit between these two widgets now you can also resize them by tapping and holding them and dragging them around if you don't want them just tap and hold them and take them up to remove now the other big change with Android 4.1 is under the hood which is called Project Butter which is designed essentially to speed up the perceptual performance of Android 4.1 so you get higher frame rates uh so transitions are much smoother uh touch events are much more accurate so you get better touchs screen sensitivity basically the whole system uh now prioritizes or better prioritizes rendering of images on the screen so definitely it feels a lot quicker and a lot smoother now one of the interesting things here is that the home screens do not have landscape mode so you can't rotate this into landscape mode uh but certain apps certainly do work in landscape mode obviously such as the movie app and you can see that the icons will reposition themselves to the corresponding location now Project Butter also shows itself when you're rotating the device around so you can see the transitions from landscape to portrait mode are pretty smooth and pretty quick now like the iPad the Nexus 7 also has a magnet which interacts with smart covers so I have a magnet here which we can test out so if you wave in the right spot you can see it turns it off or wakes it up this is a really strong magnet so I didn't even have to touch the device for it to work but you get the idea there are thirdparty cases out there right now which you can purchase on Amazon uh which work with that feature and I will have one for review in the future video Android 4.1 also brings predictive text so it's able to predict what the next word might be so for example if I were to type it was it predicted that a dark and stormy night so it's able to predict some text so you spend less time poking away at the keyboard Android 4 4.1 also has offline Voice to Text dictation I've turned off my Wi-Fi and you can go ahead and speak it was a dark and stormy night period now just to give you some perspective on the size of the Nexus 7 versus the iPad obviously the iPad is a near 10-in device so it's quite a bit larger than the 7-in uh tablet so the 7-in tablet is ideal for portability certainly better than an iPad in terms of carrying this around you can actually fit this in a pocket if you have a really large AR pocket or inside a coat pocket this is better suited for reading books because it's lighter weight and can be held in one hand pretty comfortably now in terms of battery performance this does have a 4325 milliamp battery which is good for about 9 hours of video play ma or 10 hours of web browsing or 10 hours of e reading or 300 hours on standby now in conclusion I'm very impressed by the Nexus 7 tablet especially at 199 you get some impressive internal specs and a nice sharp High quality screen now combine that with the smoothness of Android 4.1 and killer features from Google such as Google Now and the new and improved voice search and you have the best 7-in tablet money can buy right now so that's going to do for me guys in this video thanks for watching and I'll see you again in the next one\n"