Jelly Bean. These two words of zest
and tastiness forms the spirit of the Google Nexus 7, the first Pure Google
experience for the latest Android version. But there's a lot more to the Nexus
7 than just a juicy operating system, so we grab our pickaxes to dig deeper in
this issue's spelunking.
Better notifications
The pull-down notifications have been given
a face lift, as well as added functionality. You can use two fingers to expand
a notification to review additional information and options. For instance,
expanding a missed-call alert gives you options to either call or text the
person back right from the notification panel. You can also expand to reveal
email details, or to share captured screenshot images.
Screen
The 7-inch IPS display manages a 1280 x 800
resolution with 216ppi, and is protected by Corning glass. A 1.2 megapixels
camera face the front, but there's unfortunately no rear camera.
Screen
Magic widgets
You can toss widgets onto the screen, as
usual, but now they automatically move each other to make room for the new
ones. And if the new widgets are too big, they resize themselves (to the best
they can) to fit on the screen. One whole new way to customise the home screen
Tech
Spelunk: Google Nexus 7
Android Beam
The Nexus 7 supports NFC, and uses Android
Beam to facilitate instantaneous content-sharing by just bumping two
NFC-enabled Android devices, and them tapping whatever's on the screen to share
them. You also pair up Bluetooth devices using the Simple Secure Pairing
standard by tapping them together.
Tegra 3 at heart
Built by ASUS, the Nexus 7 sports an NVIDIA
Tegra 3 quad- core processor, which has a 4-PLUS-1 CPU design that offers an
additional processor core to handle the less-demanding processes, thus saving
battery and increasing performance. Google states that the Nexus 7 is built
with gaming in mind; the 12-core GPU sure helps, and the gyroscope and
accelerometer enhances the experience.
Speed increased
Jelly Bean gets a speed bump, which offers
a fast and more fluid experience. It's much more apparent when Google showed
how fluid it is using a slow-motion camera; things are smoother and every pixel
flows like butter. Google achieves this by having Jelly Bean automatically
boosting the device GPU when the user touches the screen, and then turning it
down when you need the battery life conserved.
Battery longevity
The Nexus 7 is said to have a battery life
capable of handling over 9 hours of HD video playback, 10 hours of web browsing
and 10 hours of e-reading. The stand-by time can go up to 300 hours. To achieve
this, a 4,325 mAh battery is used.
The new Google experience
Jelly Bean has a redesigned Google Search
experience that uses Knowledge Graph to better show you the results. Instead of
simply showing the Web results, Jelly Bean's search setup gives you information
cards with detailed answers about what you want to know.
Google
Nexus 7
The Search is also more thoroughly
integrated into the Android system; you can get to the Android search tool from
the lock screen by swiping upward on the slide lock, or by swiping up from the
virtual home button.
Most impressively, however, is the revamped
voice search system, which allows for more natural types of queries. Questions
such as "How is tomorrow's weather?" or "How tall is Yao
Ming?" will yield answers, which come in voice form (spoken to you) and in
graphics. You can go onwards to ask about good food locations nearby or any
other web-accessible information.
