Well, I gave in to my techno-curiosity about this whole Android thing (I just had an iPhone already) and picked up a Nexus 7 last night. It’s pretty cheap for a tablet while still being fairly high quality, so it lets me indulge my curiosity without feeling like a big commitment.
The build quality is pretty great, the screen is awesome, and no problems at all with the touch interface. The only real concerns were that the camera is pretty low-res and grainy in my living room light, but it’s clearly really just for Skype and such and people who try and take photos with tablets are evil anyway; and when holding it in landscape mode to watch a video, the sound distractingly comes from just one side, so have a good set of headphones instead. It’s a little bit heavier than expected, and my arm got a bit tired of holding it up, but that’s really just because I’m not exactly in great shape…
I checked out some comics, and although cramped, I still found them to be reasonably legible at the full-page-fit level. That was admittedly with some DC/Marvel-style bright, large-text pages though, and I can see comics with denser art and text needing more fiddling with zooming in and out. I’d say it’s ‘adequate’, obviously not as good as a full-size tablet but I’d certainly rather view them on this than my iPhone.
Google Play seems nice enough, though I haven’t really probed the depth of their selections yet. The major omission in Canada is the music store and sync/streaming service, so for us it’s just not going to be a very good music device unless you set up your own DLNA server and use something like Subsonic to do your own streaming. The Google integration is nice in that I recently switched to Chrome on the desktop, so it’s convenient already having bookmarks and such shared.
And I’m still exploring the whole Android ecosystem, but it does please the geek inside me that I can get fairly low-level with terminals, file management, etc. even without having rooted it. The app selection may be smaller, but it hasn’t really felt like anything’s missing yet (hell, I even found a .mod music player). I still have to check out the gaming selection in more depth.
I still do way too much fiddly stuff on my laptop for this to ever be a replacement for it, but I’ll just have to keep using it and see what kind of role it naturally falls into. It’s definitely way easier to use than the laptop while lying in bed…
(Though one thing that really bugged me while setting it up is that I had to log in to my Google account four times, typing out my whole crazy-long strong password each time. The first time fails because of two-factor authentication, so it redirects you to a web page to sign in again and enter the mobile code, but then I misclicked something and it took me to another web page with no obvious navigation or gesture controls to get back to the code entry. I wound up having to hard power it off and go through the whole setup process again, requiring another two password prompts. At least it was only a one-time process… The paranoid side of me also isn’t crazy about having another way essential credentials for things like Google could be leaked, but hopefully having a strong PIN on it suffices.)