It is only fit­ting that I wrote the major­ity of this post about my Nexus 7 using my Nexus 7, and I largely did it in the air­port after churn­ing on my review for a few weeks. From my brain to my thumbs onto dig­i­tal paper of my Google Drive by way of my Nexus 7 before being trans­ferred over to my Word­Press blog.

TL;DR

I am quite happy, and I wager quite heav­ily that I am hap­pier than I would have been with an iPad mini. The tablet is slick, respon­sive, and quite capable.

The Why

I bought the Nexus 7 the same day that the 32GB ver­sion went on sale. It arrived on my stoop 2 days later. I chose the Nexus 7 for a few rea­sons, largest of which was the level of inte­gra­tion avail­able to Google but also because while I enjoy my iPhone I was dis­sat­is­fied with iOS and its lim­i­ta­tions. Hav­ing used the wife’s iPad I felt I wanted the smaller form fac­tor, so the Nexus 7 leapt to the top of poten­tial can­di­date sys­tems. I explored both the Kin­dle and the Nook tablets but felt unim­pressed. When I com­pared price to hard­ware, the Nexus 7 won the battle.

My Tech­nol­ogy

I feel it’s disin­gen­u­ous to give you my review of the tablet with­out also intro­duc­ing you to the world of tech­nol­ogy I am swath in. The Nexus works for me and I think it will work for most of you, but also under­stand­ing how I use it and why I use it is impor­tant for oth­ers to know so they can draw sim­i­lar­i­ties from my experience.

A few weeks ago my per­sonal lap­top bit the dust. At the time I decided that my new tech­nol­ogy par­a­digm revolved around a pow­er­ful desk­top capa­ble of gam­ing, cod­ing, and being a home server while my mobil­ity would be dri­ven by a tablet. With the Nexus 7 I have put this sys­tem into place and so my per­sonal tech­nol­ogy break­down looks as follows:

• Work lap­top — only used for work related projects
• Desk­top PC — Cus­tom built tower cour­tesy of NewEgg.
• iPhone 4s — my pri­mary phone, it remains attached to me from the moment I wake to when I set it with the next day’s alarm.
• Nexus 7 tablet — the most junior mem­ber of this squad but quickly becom­ing my invalu­able piece of technology.
• Nook Sim­ple Touch eReader — My per­sonal library. With so much of my day spent star­ing at pro­jected light and screens I really enjoy read­ing on an e-ink display.

I won’t be giv­ing a hard­ware review of the N7, there are plenty of those avail­able online already, instead this post is meant to show you what I think about it by show­ing you my work flow and processes.

How I Use It

The major­ity of my use on the Nexus 7 is as another ves­sel by which to con­sume media. I watch YouTube, TED Talks, and movies. I lis­ten to music and pod­casts. I read news, blogs, books, social media and comics. I even wrote a sim­ple script which gen­er­ates what amounts to my own per­sonal morn­ing news­pa­per. I named it the Trick Dis­patch, and is some­thing I’ll be blog­ging about in the future after I improve the con­tent and process.

But, with all the media con­sump­tion, I also use my Nexus 7 to do a fair amount of con­tent gen­er­a­tion. Largely through writ­ing, such as this blog post or in meet­ings at work where I write notes and man­age my task lists. Thus far I have found SwiftKey as a key­board the most ideal, though it is far from per­fect and I’m always look­ing for new options, includ­ing pos­si­bly buy­ing a blue­tooth key­board for tasks beyond casual work or note tak­ing. I haven’t yet made the leap to cloud based devel­op­ment, so any­time I tweak this blog’s design I do it on my desk­top. How­ever, I did have an inter­est­ing idea for an Android app tied to that idea…

Root­ing

Root­ing the Nexus 7, while not a single-button action, is very straight-forward. The tuto­ri­als out there made the process quite pain­less and easy to do.

The Com­plaints

My pri­mary com­plaint around the Nexus 7 is that there are still some seri­ous holes in the apps avail­able for Android, or in the qual­ity of apps for Android. For some, there is sim­ply no par­al­lel between what is avail­able on iOS. The most clear exam­ple I can pro­vide is iOS’s Tweet­bot Twit­ter client. No Twit­ter client, free or paid, on Android comes close to the feel and expe­ri­ence of Tweet­bot. They’re either clunky, poorly designed with their UI, or just incom­plete in terms of func­tion­al­ity. Admit­tedly, I prob­a­bly rate in the power user range when it comes to Twit­ter, but this is def­i­nitely one area that con­verts from iOS to Android will feel pain. That said, the avail­abil­ity of apps for both iOS and Android has improved dra­mat­i­cally since I left Android behind. It is obvi­ously still not 100%, with com­pa­nies opt­ing for iOS rather than Android when forced to choose, but it’s now the minor­ity of big com­pa­nies which don’t sup­port both.

Sec­ondly I find the lack of a qual­ity rear-facing cam­era frus­trat­ing, espe­cially since I rely on the Nexus in my meet­ings. I know, as my friend Brian said, Google doesn’t want Nexus 7 users stand­ing in con­certs hold­ing up their tablets to snap pho­tos — I get that. But I do wish I could just snap pho­tos of white­boards in meet­ings, or of doc­u­ments for email­ing etc. Deal­breaker? Not for me. But it is frustrating.

So What’s Next?

Now that I have a tablet I am quite happy with, I find myself won­der­ing what the next piece of tech­nol­ogy I will lust over is. One thing I’d like to get is a fit­ness tracker of some sort, whether it is Fit­Bit, Nike Fuel­band, or one of the other options out there. As exer­cise has risen as an activ­ity I do reg­u­larly, I am wish­ing to dive into a more “quan­ti­fied self” sort of track­ing for it. We’ll see!