Nexus 7

In a moment of giddiness following the Android coding introduction I took at iOSDevUK, I ordered a Google Nexus 7. I've had it for a few weeks now (and, no, still haven't written any code for it), so here are a few of my current thoughts regarding it.

The bottom line is that I like it. I like the 7" form factor and I like the Jelly Bean system software. I don't think that, as a whole, it is better than the iPad, but it is definitely better in some ways and overall getting closer. It has replaced the iPad for most of my second-screen needs, and in particular I find it much better for reading eBooks. The screen isn't quite iPad 3 quality, but the difference isn't so great as to be noticeable, and the difference in weight more than makes up for it. (I chiefly use the Kindle app rather than iBooks, meaning that all my purchased books are synced between both devices.)

So... First impressions. Which were terrible. I was greeted by the screen you see below.

Would you look at that? A Michael Bay film (which doesn't actually exist — as all right-thinking people know, there was only ever one Transformers movie made and that stared Orson Welles and Eric Idle) and a Jeffrey Archer book. Seriously, Google, what the hell are you trying to do to me?

Joking aside, the real first impression of the Nexus 7 came from the screen which offered to set up the device with all my Google accounts. I thought I had unchecked this option when I ordered, but there on the first screen was my Google username and a prompt for my password. (Perhaps that was the difference — by unchecking that option, I had to manually start the setup process myself.)

For a lot of people, their first interaction with Jelly Bean will be entering their wifi password. This is the bit where you discover the default keyboard is disappointing compared to the iPad's and that the beep it makes on every key press is incredibly annoying. You can, of course, replace it with a third party keyboard. And here you have both the advantage and disadvantage of Android in a nutshell: the power to configure the system to your liking traded off against a less than optimal default setup.

There is a lot to prefer in Android over iOS. In many places it feels far more of an integrated whole. There are also times when it can be downright baffling. The behaviour of the system-wide back button is one such place. These two are related, as they're to do with the way individual parts of apps can be chained together and called from one another. So for instance, the Facebook app may open a page in Chrome which instantly pulls up the YouTube app to display a video. Hitting the back button will let you work backwards through this stack to return to the Facebook app. Unless you stop to interact with, say, Chrome on your way through, at which point the back button will start working back through Chrome's history. Or something. Like I said: confusing.

I can't really say what the Nexus 7 is like as a tablet, because so many of the apps I've tried are basically the phone version displayed on a large screen — or larger screen, since Android phone screens are already creeping up into the far end of big. The lack of polish is also noticeable, even in big name apps. IMDB is one of the most professional-looking I've tried, and even there the rough edges are evident, such as in the image gallery view, where you swipe the screen to flick between photos. There's no smooth page-to-page scrolling, no smooth transitions, no inertial scrolling through lists — none of the little features which are so easy for iOS developers to implement and which make such a difference to the user experience. In fact, it's sad to say that most of the apps with the best UX are direct un-Android copies of their iOS equivalents.

But in all, and for its price, the Nexus 7 is a great device. Hopefully it will inspire developers to create some great tablet apps to make best use of its features. (And since I would argue that Android tablets are a distinct market to Android phones I hope we will see it becoming worth those developers' time to do so.) I wouldn't recommend anyone get it instead of an iPad, unless they're on a very tight budget, but I'd certainly suggest you take a look at it if you were, for instance, considering a Kindle (or have given up waiting for the Kindle Fire to appear in the UK).