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Google Chrome
The arrival of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean also marks the arrival of Google Chrome as the default browser. This also doubles as the removal of Adobe’s Flash plug-in from the Android world – which while may seem annoying, I have found it fairly easy to avoid Flash. The recent rehaul of the YouTube app goes a long way to help, and any other Flash content in websites should be avoided regardless of the missing Flash plugin.
The tabbed browsing experience is very good, swiping across the edge of the display switches tabs. While it is also easy to open and close existing tabs. The URL bar is home to quick links to go back/forward, refresh, add page to bookmarks and voice search.
Text reflow is not present, although it isn’t much of a disappointment. A search in page feature is present and works well but you cannot set the default device profile to desktop. This means that even though you have a large enough screen and an HD resolution, you are going to be shown a mobile website by default.
The tab and URL area is always present, occupying some extra pixels that would be well used in a full screen browsing experience.
The presence of Chrome also means that you have full and quick access to your Google account bookmarks and recently opened Chrome tabs on your other devices.
Browser performance is good, scrolling is smooth, although some redraw is noticeable. The same goes for pinch zooming, while extremely smooth there is noticeable amounts of redrawing going on. At the end of the day it really isn’t enough to bother anyone considering the smoothness.
Wireless Connectivity
The Nexus 7 has no cellular connectivity, forcing you to rely on Wi-Fi networks 24/7. It supports WLAN 802.11 b/g/n networks, but only on the more commonplace 2.4 GHz band. As I expected, it was able to fully saturate my internet connection.
Wi-Fi coverage was good and it maintained a connection in every location I would expect it to.
Outside of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0 and NFC are also supported. These two protocols work together to form Android Beam under Android 4.1. Under the latest version of Android NFC is used to form the connection between devices while Bluetooth is used for faster file transfers. It would be nice to see Wi-Fi Direct used instead for even faster transfers but my guess is time issues or patents got in the way.
It was not faultless by any stretch of the imagination, it took about five tries to send a screenshot from the Nexus 7 to my Samsung Galaxy S III running a CyanogenMod 10 nightly. However, because of that I’m willing to put it down to buggy software on the Samsung rather than an issue with Android itself.
NFC and Android Beam can also be used to share web pages, contacts and applications.
Multimedia Playback
The video experience on the Nexus 7 is immersive although while the speaker is rather impressive for a tablet they cannot match the quality of earphones. I am also pleased to say that the Android navigation buttons disappear during playback.
The stock player on the Nexus 7 can playback MKV and MP4 video files just fine but MOV files will require the assistance of a third party player such as MX Player. Again, if you have a lot of high quality files you are best off using an alternative player.
