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Hardware Exploration and Design
The Nexus 7 tablet looks like your standard, and rather bland el-cheapo 7 inch tablet but this is as far as the cheap moniker lasts. Holding it in hand you can tell this is a device worthy of a price higher than its asking price – this is a quality we have come to largely expect from ASUS.
The tablet itself fits and feels well in hand with its rounded corners. It should be said that this is a 7 inch device and navigation with one hand (while holding the tablet up as well) is rather limited. While using two hands does not feel cramped at all.
The front is dominated by the 7 inch IPS display, with rather large bezels surrounding this. While the bezels may appear annoyingly large, they are there for a reason – to prevent accidental screen taps while holding the tablet during standard usage.
This entire face is not protected by Corning Gorilla Glass but is instead layered with some form of scratch resistant glass from Corning. This glass is rather prone to fingerprints and it can make the display look rather awful if not cleaned every week or so.
The top edge in the standard portrait orientation houses the 1.2 MP camera and the light sensor. The single front facing camera isn’t useful for much but it works well for Google+ hangouts. Anything more than this will require you to install this camera launcher from the Play Store.
In order to keep costs in order, the Nexus 7 doesn’t have some seemingly basic things such as a notification LED or vibration motor for haptic feedback. Neither exclusion bothered me overly so, but it is something to be aware of.
The edges of the device are home to some faux-chrome edging, merging to the almost faux-leather rear casing which is really just coated plastic with a golf ball-esque texture. The rear of the device is where some ASUS and larger Nexus branding is found. Also found is the speaker slot – behind which two drivers are found.
The only ports on the Nexus 7 are found on the bottom edge, a MicroUSB jack is located on the lower edge in the centre. It should be said that it doesn’t support MHL, nor does it support USB-OTG without rooting the tablet. The 3.5mm jack is also found near the right corner.
Display
The Nexus 7 has a 7 inch IPS display with a HD resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. This equates to a pixel density of 216 PPI, which is only marginally lower than a 10.1 inch tablet with a Full HD display. The result means that individual pixels are near impossible to spot from normal viewing distances.
The display quality itself is pretty good, as is standard with edge-lit IPS displays there is some degree of backlight bleeding but unless you focus on finding it on a darker background you are highly unlikely to notice it.
Viewing angles on the 7 inch display are good, well, very good as far as standard usage angles up to 100 degrees go. The display’s brightness peak is good but not great, and thus visibility in sunlight is adequate – although there is the attributed battery drain. Meanwhile auto-brightness levels I found to be near perfect.
Colours are good on the Nexus 7’s IPS display although they aren’t quite as saturated as what I would prefer. Greens particularly appear to be lacking. Coming from the Galaxy S III’s Super AMOLED display, it does seem a little bit bland, but on its own merits the Nexus’ display is much better than displays you might expect on a device of this price.
