The Nexus 7 "Real-user" review: Part 1 - Initial impressions, Design/Build quality, synthetic benchmarks and performance in actual-use

The first device to sport Android OS version 4.1, Jelly Bean, and a
serious salvo fired over the bow of Amazon - is it good enough?

So we come to part one of the Nexus 7 review. If I'm not very much mistaken a great many of you are watching this device eagerly, and I'm quite sure it is already well on its way to achieving its goal of making inroads for Android into the tablet market. But does it deserve to? That's the fundamental question here really. Is it good enough for the asking price to deserve your dollar, or do the inevitable compromises for cost harm the end result in the Nexus 7 too much?

Read on to find out whether our early impressions suggest this is the best way to spend your $200...

[Oh, and if you've already made the leap and purchased an N7 you might like to head to our guide for Rooting the N7 so you can start making the most of your shiny new toy]

Before we get into the review proper I need to make a wee note about how the review will proceed, since there will be a distinct divide between people who've read our reviews before and those who haven't. Like I did with the S3 review, I realized that there are some things I wanted to speak to that I’ve already covered in prior reviews like the Galaxy Note review and my Clove Blog review of the Galaxy S II. That content tends to be either a little editorial in nature, or provides what I view as necessary preamble and context setting for the sections it pertains to. If you’ve read my earlier reviews however you will already have been subjected to my views on things like build quality Vs build materials, and myths about SD cards, and likely neither need (nor want) to revisit those things. In the N7 review those segments will appear immediately under subheadings, and the text will be italicized – feel free to skip over it and get to the meat that follows if you’re a practised AndroidNZ reader.

Initial impressions and Design

The almost faux-leather material that covers the rear of the device is
very lovely, no doubt higher quality materials like the lovely brushed
metals of the Transformer tablets were out of the question with the
budget constraints on the Nexus 7, but there is still plenty to love
about the choice of materials and their implementation here

I must admit, despite reading several reviews before receiving my N7 that suggested it didn't feel like a $200 device in the flesh, I still harboured some trepidation about just how it would actually be. Would the cost-costing be immediately apparent? Would it look cheap? Feel cheap? Certainly previous encounters with its only real competitor in its price bracket, the Kindle Fire, did nothing to reassure.

Fortunately none of that foreboding was realised when I was finally holding my Nexus 7 in my very own hands. It certainly isn't going to give the Samsung Tab 7.7 or Transformer Prime a run for their money in the "feelings-of-premiumness" stakes, but it definitely doesn't feel cheap.

At a push I'd say it punches well, well above it's weight for the quality impression:price ratio. While it may fall noticeably short of those aforementioned benchmark Android tablets in this regard I don't think anyone could legitimately say it feels even remotely $300 worse.

In terms of the design there isn't that much to say really. It's a solid slab, with very little going on in terms of hardware controls or ports on the devices exterior. The portrait-oriented right hand side of the device features only the power button and volume rocker, and the bottom of the device is where you'll find the micro USB charging/data connection/host port and headphone jack, and the back goes sans-camera lens a sports only the speaker grill. Everything is fine, and really all I can find to quibble about is that the power button and volume rockers aren't placed quite far enough apart and I often seemed to locate the incorrect button when using them (and even there that could just be a learning curve thing, although four days with the device would seem sufficient to get the requisite muscle memory going).

Build quality and ergonomics

Reminder: If you’ve read my reviews before scroll down to the next bit of non-italicized text, up until then I’m just going to be repeating my little spiel about the distinction between build materials and build quality for the uninitiated.

Whether it be in professional reviews, or merely the innumerable commentators who feel compelled to tell the world their opinion, the term “build quality” gets bandied about a lot. Unfortunately in many of those instances people are in fact referring to "build materials". The two terms tend to be thrown about like synonyms, but they're not. It is possible to have one without the other.

The Galaxy S II and HTC Sensation are two examples that spring to mind to make the point. 

The volume rocker and power button, spaced slightly too close for
comfort for this reviewers use

The Galaxy S II build materials are disappointing plastics, but they’re durable. There are no moving parts or creaks, and as you’ll see if you care to look at some drop test videos on YouTube, it holds up to drops and knocks better than an iPhone 4S which is made from much nicer materials. 


In other words its build quality is good. Contrast this with the HTC Sensation, which is made from great materials with metal and high quality soft-touch plastics, but has a more suspect build quality with the 'sleeve' design causing creaks, dust accumulation under the screen, and volume rockers that break (of course not every Sensation is afflicted by these, but it's sporadic failure rate is higher than I've observed from other high-end handsets). 

Now obviously I want a handset with both, and I think for the kind of money we throw at these flagship handsets we really shouldn’t have to be compromising on one or the other, but if it does come down to choosing I'll take build quality, thank you very much.

So, how is the Nexus 7's build quality?

It seems perfectly fine, at least so far as I can tell over 4 days of heavy use. It's a closed slab after all -  there's no removable battery, no card slot, no moving parts - not much can go wrong providing the materials aren't brazenly cheap and poorly machined. They certainly aren't here. It passes the usual gut wrenching test I apply to all new devices - very firmly applied torsion about the long and short axes of the device - with flying colours. No creaks, give, movement, or tell tale rippling in the LCD panel (thank heavens, I've induced that last one in a few budget tablets and it's rather alarming).

The materials are all plastics of one kind or another, but I can't really fault them in practice - particularly the lovely, almost faux-leather material used on the rear casing. The screen itself is very nice and has a good touch response, a dead give-away for low quality components amongst most budget tablets that occupy the same market segment price-wise. I do note that it is particularly prone to accumulating greasy finger marks in regular use, something I had become unaccustomed to after being treated by excellent oleophobic coatings in both the One X and SIII recently. I guess when your manufacturing costs are as tightly regulated as they are here a few extra dollars for a fancy screen treatment is out of the question.

Naturally the durability over time is an important element of build quality, and while I have no reason to suspect anything untoward so far you never know when a short drop might expose an easily scratched screen or worse... If anything like that does happen, to me or anyone else in more than negligible numbers, you can bet you'll hear about it in an update.


Ergonomics

The spartan exteriors busiest area, the bottom of the device where you'll
find a speaker grille, headset jack, and micro USB port

7-8 inch tabs are the sweet spot for me, so perhaps I'm biased here, but from the ergonomic point of view the Nexus 7 is going to easily outdo any of the 9+inch tablets in the ergonomics stakes. Thing like the ability to comfortably type with two thumbs in portrait mode, or a weight low enough to allow the device to be comfortably held in the hands for longer sessions, simply cannot be overstated from a purely ergonomic standpoint.

Looking at the Nexus 7 it isn't the thinnest, or the even the lightest tablet in it's niche, but neither is it burdensomely heavy or thick. The slightly grippy, almost faux-leather rear casing, helps matters here also - in a smaller tablet a slippery rear casing would be something of a liability. All said and done I can't level much complaint at the Nexus 7 from this perspective.

The Screen

If you read part one of our SIII review then you'll know exactly how I feel about screen technology in mobile devices at present. I laboured over the point fairly hard in that review, since the screen was being touted as a major differentiator between the SIII and arch-rival handset the HTC One X. In the tablet realm I don't feel quite the same need run over all the same ground, so (for once) I will keep this blessedly short.

The Nexus 7 screen is good.

Ok, maybe not that brief. The specs sheet has it that the Nexus 7 display is a 7inch capacitive IPS LCD panel with a screen resolution of 1280x800 pixels. Given the ubiquity of IPS panels in the tablet realm that isn't, on it's own, exactly going to set the world on fire. When you figure in the price point the N7 is being offered at here however, it starts to look a little more special. Lesser species in it's market hunting ground tend to sport rather horrible panels, with poor brightness, contrast, and blacks, and even more horrific viewing angles. Some even have *shudder* resistive touch screens. I know that some Nokia fans are still trying to say that resistive screens have their place amongst outdoors workers in Siberia, but please, the rest of us moved into the real world a long time ago. In it's market segment the Nexus 7 screen is really quite remarkable, being in line with the best displays out there regardless of cost right up until you hit the 'retina' display of the iPad 3.

I do note reports of bad ghosting on the displays of some units, but can't really say anything more on that since my unit didn't exhibit this fault. At this point I don't really know if the problem is very isolated - possibly only affecting some I/O N7s - or more widespread. We'll know soon enough as the Nexus starts reaching the hands of consumers, because if this is widespread expect the hue and cry from new owners to be deafening. Will keep you all posted.

A nice PPI weighing in at ~216 is joined by an IPS panel offering
good colour reproduction, viewing angles, blacks and contrast.
A truly remarkable feat at the asking price. 

Speed and synthetic benchmarks

Hopefully everyone reading this is up to speed on benchmarks; they are less important than how the phone performs in actual use, and additionally some of them actually aren't even particularly good (Quadrant, I'm looking at you). Despite their relative lack of real-world usefulness you all love them anyways, and so help us, so do we.

If anything the real usefulness of benchmarks for me is not as a measure of handset performance, but rather a measure of the quality of a reviewers technical knowledge of Android. The second you see a score from Nenamark 1, Benchmark Pi, or an onscreen GLBench result you know the reviewer doesn't have a good grip on what they're talking about when it comes to technical aspects and you can pretty much filter their opinion accordingly. 

What I'm going to do here is run the N7 through a number of benchmarks, and then give my early impressions for how the device is in terms of responsiveness; the benchmarks in context as it were.

So, here are the benchmarks, and a few words on how we rate their usefulness:


Quadrant

Shock! Horror! I am not going give you a Quadrant score for the S III. Quadrant just doesn't give results that are generalisable to real-world use, so I'm making good on my promise in the Note review that we'd stop reporting on it. If you feel you really must know the irrelevant Quadrant score there are plenty of reviews out there that will give them to you.

CF-Bench

Here is the first of the benchmarks we have some regard for here at AndroidNZ - Chainfire bench. CF-Bench for me probably has the biggest bearing on actual use, and for that reason alone stands above most others. The result here isn't particularly impressive, falling a fair margin beneath the SIII at the top of the table, and even a little below its Tegra 3-toting brethren. Since CF-Bench tests a number of things including things like disk read and write speeds, I can't help but wonder whether slightly cheaper components like the inbuilt SD card are making their presence felt here...

Antutu


Sadly Antutu doesn't show in the Play Store for the Nexus 7, I presume as it hasn't updated to support Jelly bean yet. Moving right along...

Smartbench 2012


The last general benchmark we run handsets through here, Smartbench 2012 shows nice results for the N7 in comparison to other HD devices - even including the Galaxy SIII.

Vellamo

Vellamo is a browser benchmark software made by Qualcomm. It encompasses a variety of tests including standards like Sunspider, aggregating them to produce a single score. While the Nexus 7 acquitted itself very well in Smartbench, it doesn't fare quite so well here with scores considerably lower than the Galaxy SIII and even other Tegra 3 devices. How much the change of stock browser to Chrome is having an effect here I'm not sure.

Browsermark

...speaking of different browsing benchmarks, we come now to Browsermark. Browsermark actually runs itself in the browser directly, and as such is available to nearly any platform - great for cross-platform arguments over the water cooler about whose phone is better (not that we condone that sort of thing, much less using synthetic benchmarks to do it). While the result here falls well short of the stellar ~170,000 scored by the SIII, the result is nevertheless a credible improvement over earlier Tegra 3 devices, and still thrashes the 4S by some ~45,000 points (you know, for when several iOS users corner you at the water cooler demanding answers).

GLBenchmark 2.1.4

As of right now this is the only credible graphics benchmark available on Android, because the Mali-400 in the Galaxy SIII hits its V-Sync limitation in basically all of the others. We're not dealing with a Mali-400 here however, and we can results that are commensurate with other Tegra 3-bearing devices like the HTC One X. They're not going to challenge the Mali-400 anytime soon, but for present mobile gaming requirements they should prove sufficient for most users (not to mention this is an incredible class of GPU hardware to get in a package that only sets you back $200US).

Nenamark 2

An onscreen graphics benchmark. Nenamark 2 has until now been a reasonable onscreen graphics benchmark, being one of the few that could actually push phones hard enough to overpower their GPUs and demonstrate results less than V-Sync limitations... or at least that was the case before the SIII came along. Previous Tegra 3 devices have been able to run Nenamark 2 though its paces at about 47fps, and we can see here a nice little bump for the Nexus 7, which, if I were to hazard a guess, probably has some relationship to "Project Butter" and the various optimisations in play there (even though those are mostly related to navigating through Android OS elements).

Actual use

So, for the money you're getting some pretty serious benchmark cred. Guess what? None of that matters a whit if the device handles poorly in general use. The N7 doesn't. Did you really expect anything else after seeing all the hoopla over Project Butter? Basically this is the only Android device in general use that matches the vaunted SIII for smoothness. It even goes one better than the SIII in some areas, notably in the "Recent apps" view, where the Nexus just flies. To be perfectly frank I can barely imagine anything much smoother or faster than the Nexus 7 or the SIII, at a guess I'd speculate that the SIII Jelly Bean update will be something else.

When you step into apps you will notice some hitches here and there, since the Jelly Bean and Project Butter improvements won't translate into all those apps (or at least not until they update to take advantage of the improvements on offer). That doesn't really have much to do with the Nexus 7 itself per se, and certainly isn't unique to the N7 either, so I don't feel particularly strongly about docking points from the N7 because of these. In the scheme of things it's quite low level, and Android users coming from anything other than an SIII probably won't have ever used a device smooth enough to have really made note of these instances in any case.

Summary 

...and now to compress all the above into some tidy bullet points:

• The Nexus 7 is likely to at least meet, and probably exceed your expectations in terms of it's quality-impression: price ratio. I know it did mine.
• A few very minor niggles aside, the design, materials, build quality and ergonomics are all very decent indeed. 
• The screen is very good, not best in class for tablets overall, but easily best in class for its price point - and by a very large margin.
• While the Nexus 7 benchmarks really quite well by any standards, the real talking point should be how it performs in actual use. Even Galaxy SIII users might find themselves pleasantly surprised here, marvelling at what an accomplishment that level of smooth is for what the Nexus 7 will set you back.

Well, with part one complete it's time for me to ship the device to one of the other editors to fondle and write about, so please direct your attention toward @lokhor on Twitter to get more up-to-the-second feedback on the Nexus 7 while you await the next part of the review. If you're wondering why I'm sending the N7 to someone else to review, perhaps thinking I've taken leave of my senses at a time when most people would kill to have one in their possession, well I can't really blame you. But hey, I have enough on my plate already - I still have to bring you the third and final part of my epic Galaxy SIII review right?

Oh, and if I missed out your favourite benchmark that-you-just-simply-must-have-or-you-will-die, please drop me a line in the comments section below. Similarly, if I neglected to cover something you feel you really need to know in order to make a decision about purchasing the S III, let me know just how remiss I've been in your commentary (of course if you just want to say nice things about the first part of the review please do feel free to help yourself also). Finally, if you've enjoyed reading this and think our review deserves a wider audience, we'd really appreciate it if you'd think about sharing our review out to your social media channels.


(and don't forget the first rule of AndroidNZ: don't ask about battery life this early on, it's not as if anyone can say anything truly meaningful about that after only a few days)