I don’t often buy new hardware, but the time had come to buy an Android tablet for software testing. So I went searching for a device that would suite my needs. I wanted my device to be able to play some games, browse the web and perhaps play some music or multimedia. It would of course be best for it to have the latest version of the Android OS as well.
I checked out many tablets of varying cost, size and power. I found that the ASUS Nexus 7 fit the bill. Many other tablets were larger, but had poorer quality displays. Some of the tablets the shops had in stock were old ones that have been around for a while, and had outdated software. The Nexus 7 has a quad-core processor that makes many of the other tablets look silly and obsolete, and a clean and crisp display that whilst not being the largest, certainly looks very nice, and in many cases better than it’s larger cousins. The touch display is very responsive, and I’ve found it to be quite good for the few games that I have tried. Battery life is very good, I played Angry Birds and browsed the web for about 3 hours and only used up about a third of the battery.
That being said there are some negatives to go with it. It doesn’t have a port to add extra storage in the form of an SD card, or any other ports at all for that matter. So there is no using USB memory sticks with this device. It does support bluetooth, but that’s just another device with more batteries to carry around. The glass on the screen can be very reflective, so you need to choose a good, low glare situation to use the device. The in-built camera is also of a fairly low megapixel count, so not really useful for anything more than web chatting.
The software package containing a lot of google apps pre-installed is excellent. There is the obvious facilities for you tube, email and web, but also a nice app for looking at maps and using the GPS built-in. I found a few apps in google play that are handy for connecting via ssh, and VNC to machines remotely. The built-in software has been pretty easy to use, the only downside being there isn’t a flash player built-in so I can’t watch TV via ABC iView (an Australian TV streaming service). Other types of web-based video seem to work fine.
In conclusion the Nexus 7 is a fantastic device for browsing the web, you tube, and android games. You can put your music on it, but there isn’t really enough space for any amount of video. 16G may sound like a lot, but if you were to want to store a lot of any kind of media you’d quickly run out. I have enough computers to handle my multimedia needs so this isn’t really a problem for me. Now that I have the device I’ve found it’s really handy for browsing the web, and watching you tube videos, but also performs a few other useful things I hadn’t anticipated. It’s good in that I don’t have to wait for a computer to boot up, or use as much electricity to perform some of my common day-to-day tasks. It’s also nice to be able to do these things anywhere in the house. Sitting up in bed has been a favourite, especially on a cold night.
sparcie 
Something I’ve found out since is that if you wish to play movies on the Nexus, you need to convert the movie files to mp4 if they are not already. This fortunately is a very simple task as the video player VLC has a save/convert function you can use to do just that. VLC is cross platform and free, so it it a very good option not just for converting, but also playing video on your computer.