The 7-inch Android tablet is one of the scrappiest models in the gadget landscape. From one manufacturer to the next, one year to the next, these tablets have failed to find an audience or win any vocal supporters. Yet sales for the 10-inch iPad continue to vault higher with each quarter. All the while, companies keep trying to make 7-inchers work, hammering away at the form factor, making the same mistakes (underpowered internals, chunky bodies, poor performance), expecting different results.

The form saw its first measured success with the Kindle Fire, which cracked a few million unit sales in a single month during 2011's holiday season. But the Fire's reception then, and sales performance since, doesn't suggest a raft of blissfully happy customers. While Amazon's tablet has a couple of enthusiastic fans here at Ars, the guess in our review that it would "end up often as a gift from early tablet adopters to late ones" seemed to come true. You wouldn't buy one for yourself, perhaps, but it was a good enough present for the technologically apathetic: Mom, Dad, Grandma, or Technologically Illiterate Sibling.

Enter stage right—well, more like stage from above, the God of Tablets bombing down in a skydiving suit wearing Google Glass—the Nexus 7. Google adopted the internals of Asus's Memo 370 shown at CES in January, revamped the body, and bequeathed the device with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. All while maintaining a $199 base price point.

The specs, design, and cost all make the Nexus 7 seem like the Holy Grail of tablets. As we'll show later, it can even keep pace with the (significantly more expensive) iPads in many respects. It's great. Suspiciously great. Suddenly we have everything we want (well, close to it), for less money than we probably would have paid for it. Selling hardware cheap—in hopes that more money can be made elsewhere—is not a new game. But the Nexus 7 suggests Google is going to play that game harder and better than we've seen in a long time.

More than anything, the Nexus 7 is Google's comment on the state of the Android tablet. The company has delivered both a backhand and a helping hand to its long-suffering hardware partners (or at least to Asus, which partnered with Google on this model).

Body

The Nexus 7 has a 10.45-millimeter thick body, with a Corning glass-covered IPS display and a curved, slightly rubbery, dimpled back. A long slot for the speaker sits on the back, just before it curves into the edge where the microUSB port sits centered on the bottom, next to the headphone jack on the right corner. The only buttons, a sleep switch and volume rocker, are along the right hand side. The NFC sensor is placed on the opposite corner. The Nexus 7 appears to have two pinhole mics, one about an inch above the NFC sensor (for sound canceling) and another on the top left corner (for voice reception).

The Nexus 7's bezel is thicker on the shorter sides, just a hair over two centimeters, while on the longer side it measures 1.1 centimeters. This makes it slightly more comfortable and natural to hold in landscape orientation (when typing, though, portrait orientation is definitely superior). It's too bad Google can't appropriate the iPad's ability to split the keyboard to make it closer to the user's two thumbs in landscape. As it is, landscape typing on a 7-inch screen still creates a lot of strain (ten-finger typing is, of course, right out).

The keyboard is not quite as snappy as the rest of the Nexus 7 experience. It seems to occasionally miss letters, or have to catch up after a series of letters are typed, especially right after waking. This happened infrequently, but was a bit frustrating when it did. Unlike the Kindle Fire, the Nexus 7 is Bluetooth-capable (this was one of our major strikes against the Fire's status as a tablet). Paired with a keyboard, the Nexus 7 could easily serve as a mobile work solution just as the iPad can.

Overall, the body is very comfortable to hold. In carrying it around, I felt I could handle it more like a book than either the Kindle Fire or iPad 2. It feels solid without being too heavy, and the rubberiness of the back keeps it from being too slippery. The dimpled back seems to be entirely an aesthetic choice, and an odd one at that, though we suppose it might be a superior material choice for concealing fingerprints.

Like the Kindle Fire, the Nexus 7 has no hardware home button. Instead, the three Android 4.1 Jelly Bean soft keys are everpresent along the bottom of the screen: Back, Home, and Recent Apps, which will show apps you've used recently in reverse chronological order. The exception to the buttons' appearance is when you are e-reading or watching movies, when the icons will fade completely or be reduced to dark gray dots, respectively.





By default, the home screen of the Nexus 7 is designed to ape that of the Kindle Fire, with readable media and audio widgets arranged front and center. As we mentioned in our first impressions post, the Nexus 7 comes with a small selection of content pre-loaded. This includes but is not limited to Swann's Way, copies of Popular Science and Esquire, and a few songs from Google Play's Music store. One movie comes pre-loaded, Transformers: Dark of the Moon. That's a battery life tester's dream: turn the volume and brightness up, press play, stuff it between two couch cushions, and go do something else for two and a half hours.

The Nexus 7 weighs 11.99 ounces (340 grams), 2.6 ounces lighter than the Kindle Fire. While we found the Kindle Fire just a bit too cumbersome and heavy to hold up in the air while reading, the Nexus 7's lighter weight and sleeker body means we can successfully hold it up like a book for 20 minutes to half an hour without our arm getting tired. Holding the Nexus 7 by the edge gets tiresome a bit quicker than holding it from the bottom, pinky and thumb propped in front, with the other three fingers supporting it from the back, like you'd hold a paperback open.