Sour Lollipop update bricks some Nexus 7 tablets

Rob Pegoraro | Special for USA TODAY

Q. I tried installing Google's Lollipop upgrade on my Nexus 7, but the tablet failed to boot up afterward. Google says I'll have to pay to get it repaired. Now what?

A. Something has gone seriously wrong with this branch of the Nexus line of Android devices. Instead of showing Google's mobile operating system at its best, a non-trivial number of 2013-model-year Nexus 7 tablets (as well as some 2012 versions) have been "bricked" after a toxic interaction with a software update.

The symptoms, as recounted on Google's customer-support forum, on Twitter under the hashtag #Nexus7Bricked, on reddit, and in reports at sites like 9 to 5 Google, Android Police and Android Authority, involve the tablet getting stuck at the Google logo either in its first reboot after installing Google's Android Lollipop release or days or weeks post-update.

Users report that the usual software troubleshooting, booting the device into Android's "recovery mode" and performing a complete reset from there, doesn't work. The only option is to replace the tablet's motherboard.

That's bad enough. But Asus, the manufacturer of both Nexus 7 tablets, is treating this as an out-of-warranty repair and quoting owners estimates of $200 or more for a fix – almost as much as the 2013 Nexus 7's $229 starting price.

Google is apparently replacing some of these bricked Nexus 7 devices at no cost if they were originally bought from its own Play Store. But it's yet to post a confirmation of this policy, and not all eligible owners seem to be able to claim this offer.

A Google spokeswoman declined to comment, while a query to Asus's PR department sent Thursday went unanswered.

All of this is so far from what we thought we were getting when Google introduced the Nexus 7 in July of 2013 – with a sharper screen and lower price than that summer's iPad mini – and what reviewers such as USA TODAY's Ed Baig observed after trying out this tablet firsthand.

Instead of representing "the best of Google," to quote the company's blog post at the time, the Nexus 7 is showing the company at its worst: buggy software and an inability to speak clearly to its customers.

(I might as well note here that my own experience with the Lollipop update was not all sweet: Like other Nexus 4 users, I found that Lollipop would leave me mute on phone calls. The problem seems to have gone away with Android 5.1, but shouldn't this be the sort of bug that basic quality-assurance testing catches before an update ships?)

If you have a Nexus 7 and have not yet installed Lollipop, the only advice I can give you is to avoid that update as if it were a swarm of bees.

If your device is already bricked and you didn't buy it from the Play Store – or you can't get Google to fix or replace it for free – see if the credit card you used to purchase it includes any extended purchase protection covering out-of-warranty repairs.

And then feel free to take your business elsewhere when you next go shopping for a tablet. That's exactly what the reporter friend who tipped me off about this problem did, buying an Amazon HD Kindle Fire tablet to replace an inert Nexus 7.

Tip: Control Google Now's cards

The Google Now software built into Android and the Google app for iOS can be a remarkably prescient copilot for your physical and digital life, but sometimes it gets the wrong ideas about your interests.

When that happens, don't just swipe the irrelevant "card" off the screen. Tap the row of three dots (or, in the iOS app, the small "i" button), and you can tell Google Now you're not interested in this search topic.

The other way to keep certain search topics (non-hypothetical example: answering my daughter's curiosity about My Little Pony's cast of characters) from appearing in Google Now is, of course, not to let Google know you're interested. You can do your Google search in an incognito window to stop the site from tracking your curiosity, or you can use another search engine entirely.

And that's how this Android feature has become surprisingly effective at getting me to try out a Google competitor, the privacy-optimized search site DuckDuckGo.

Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.