I still have a bad taste in my mouth because of the whole order­ing and ship­ping expe­ri­ence. As expected, after the pack­age bounc­ing around on UPS trucks for the bet­ter part of a week, the ship­ping box was pretty beat up.

notice all the trans­fer stick­ers. UPS FAIL!

[Deep breath]

Ok. I finally have the Nexus 7 in hand! Now, let me get on with shar­ing my first impressions.

PACKAGING

For­tu­nately, the ship­ping box con­tained an inflated pack­ing bub­ble, so the retail box for the Nexus 7 was not damaged.

I was fore­warned that the Nexus 7 was packed pretty tight into the box, and unbox­ing could be tricky. The pack­ag­ing is, indeed, snug, but I man­aged to get the box open with­out mak­ing too many deposits into my imag­i­nary swear jar.

nexus 7 pack­age contents

Many review­ers have stated that back of the Nexus 7 looks like a golf ball. I think these peo­ple must not play much golf. To me, it looks like per­fo­rated leather, like what you might see on a dri­ving glove, or car seat upholstery.

Though I actu­ally han­dled a Nexus 7 prior to receiv­ing mine (thanks Fran­cis!), I was sur­prised at how solid the tablet feels. In my head, I was con­cerned about the build qual­ity of a $200 tablet. Asus did a really nice job.

The Nexus 7 is built to work with data in the cloud, namely Google Play and other Google ser­vices. The lack of inter­nal mem­ory is the biggest clue — just 8GB or 16GB. This reliance on cloud stor­age becomes even more obvi­ous as you take a quick tour of the exte­rior of the tablet. There is a power but­ton, vol­ume rocker, head­phone jack and a micro-USB port. That’s it.

My wife teases me about being a man­ual reader. Keep­ing true to form, I had already perused the Nexus 7 user guide before receiv­ing the tablet — I had enough time (eye roll) — so after tak­ing a tour of the exte­rior, I pow­ered it up.

The screen is gor­geous! Frankly, I am get­ting sick of the Apple zom­bies that throw “But, is it a Retina dis­play?” around. No. First of all, Retina dis­play is Apple’s thing. Every­thing doesn’t have to be Apple. Sec­ondly, and prob­a­bly more impor­tantly, I doubt that the aver­age per­son can dis­cern the dif­fer­ence in pixel den­sity between the Nexus 7 and the new iPad. I can, but it’s not that big of a deal. The screen on the Nexus 7 has deep blacks, rich col­ors, and the text on the screen is pretty damned sharp.

SETUP

If you’ve every used an Android device, you know that set up is pretty easy. You sim­ply enter your pri­mary Google or Google Apps email address and you’re off.

gotta love that my nexus 7 already knows me!

This ini­tial setup took all of about two min­utes. I did click through things a lit­tle too quickly, because I clicked “Ok” for the Nexus 7 to sync all the apps in my Google Play account. I didn’t want it to do that, but I sim­ply unin­stalled the apps that I didn’t want once they fin­ished load­ing. Almost as soon as the Nexus 7 was setup, I received a noti­fi­ca­tion than an update to the oper­at­ing sys­tem was avail­able. That was fast. I clicked “Ok” and let the update do its thing.

OPERATION

Over­all, the Nexus 7 is very easy to oper­ate. There is an adjust­ment, though, if you’re com­ing to the Jelly Bean ver­sion of Android from a device run­ning on Gin­ger­bread. A fair num­ber of the ges­tures and con­trols are dif­fer­ent, and take a lit­tle get­ting used to. The oper­a­tive word is “lit­tle.” The Jelly Bean ver­sion of Android is very intuitive.

Press the power but­ton and you’re pre­sented with a sim­ple image of a lock. Sim­ply tap­ing the lock screen presents you with two options — unlock the device or go to Google Now. I’ll dis­cuss the lat­ter in a moment.

Unlock­ing the device for the first time, the home screen is pop­u­lated with an edge-to-edge Google Play store widget.

This wid­get adjusts as you add to, play, or read items in your Google Play library. It’s an attrac­tive wid­get. The size of wid­get, like prac­ti­cally every other wid­get on the Nexus 7, can be adjusted. Irre­spec­tive of the size, I found the wid­get to be a bit too heavy for my taste. Remov­ing the wid­get is easy. Sim­ply long-press and drug it toward the top of the screen. Speak­ing wid­gets, adding a wid­get to one of the home screens is no longer per­formed by long-pressing on the screen. With Ice Cream Sand­wich, and above, you have to tap the launcher but­ton and go the wid­gets tab to select a wid­get. Long press the desired wid­get and and drag it to a page.

Side­bar: With the pur­chase of the Nexus 7, Google has thrown in sev­eral free mag­a­zines to sam­ple, a free book, the last Trans­former movie, and $25 credit in the Google Play store. Not bad.

The han­dling of noti­fi­ca­tions in Jelly Bean is quite dif­fer­ent than what I’m accus­tomed to…and that’s a good thing. Gin­ger­bread allowed you to delete indi­vid­ual items in the noti­fi­ca­tions bar. Ice Cream intro­duced the abil­ity to swipe indi­vid­ual noti­fi­ca­tions. Jelly Bean takes the noti­fi­ca­tion a step fur­ther with not only swip­ing, but also rich con­tent. Now, instead of just see­ing that I have two mes­sages (email, text), I can swipe down with two fin­gers of the email noti­fi­ca­tion and see a lit­tle bit about each email.

Another new fea­ture that I like is the addi­tion of mag­a­zines and TV shows to the Google Play store. Read­ing mag­a­zines on the Nexus 7 is a pretty smooth expe­ri­ence. You can flip through a mag­a­zine one page at a time, or you can tap the screen to pull up a slider at the bot­tom of the screen that lets you skip ahead to any page. You can zoom in on any page, but the tra­di­tional spread-to-zoom ges­ture doesn’t resize the text, though. To get a clear read of a spe­cific arti­cle in the mag­a­zine, tap the screen and click “view text” at the top right of the screen. Google Play Mag­a­zine con­verts the arti­cle to a clean, read­able arti­cle, that you can scroll through left-to-right.

One oper­a­tional issue I’ve encoun­tered with the Nexus 7 has to do with the phys­i­cal design. The power but­ton and the vol­ume rocker are too close to each other. I find myself turn­ing off the screen when I’m try­ing to turn up the vol­ume. This is par­tic­u­larly annoy­ing when watch­ing a video because the video stops when the screen goes dark.

GOOGLE NOW

Depend­ing on who you ask, Google Now is either described as a Apple Siri beater, or a shame­less, infe­rior, knock off of Siri. I couldn’t care less about com­par­isons. I just want to know if the prod­uct per­forms as promised. Here is the video intro­duc­ing Google Now.

In my expe­ri­ence, I found that Google Now is only con­sis­tent with a few things — show­ing the weather, show­ing dri­ving esti­mates to-and-from work, and answer­ing most queries accu­rately. Unfor­tu­nately, I have yet to see Google Now “learn” from my queries and add info cards, such as flight infor­ma­tion and place sug­ges­tions, to my Google Now screen. I recently trav­eled to Atlanta. I searched my out­bound flight more than once, but Google Now never showed me a card for that flight with a sta­tus update, on it’s own. I always had to search anew, and that didn’t always give me con­sis­tent results. Addi­tion­ally, I had the flight on my cal­en­dar. The cal­en­dar notice showed up in Google Now as a small card, but it didn’t inter­pret that data from that appoint­ment and cre­ate a card for the flight. I tried the same thing for my return flight from Atlanta, and expe­ri­enced the same thing. That was dis­ap­point­ing. I’m also a lit­tle stumped why Google Now keeps show­ing me dri­ving infor­ma­tion to work on Sat­ur­day and Sun­day. I’ve only had the Nexus 7 since Mon­day, but I haven’t trav­eled in that direc­tion since Thurs­day. I don’t know how long it takes for Google Now to learn from my move­ment pat­terns, but so far it’s seri­ously lack­ing. Like­wise, I have been searched for sports scores of some favorite teams every day, but Google Now has yet to auto­mat­i­cally show me the sched­ule for these teams, nor the scores of their games. I’ve tried adjusted the set­tings, with no suc­cess. I’ll stay after it, but Google Now seems like a nov­elty that isn’t quite ready for prime time. Of course, I’m always pre­pared to account for user error, but I just don’t see it.

Update on Google Now

OOPS

In just a week, my Nexus 7 has had two force closes and one com­plete device lock up, which required a soft reset to get it work­ing again. Force closes have plagued Android devices, so I truly hope this is not a recur­ring issue with the Nexus 7.

WRAP UP

After one week with the Nexus 7, here’s my hon­est opin­ion. The Nexus 7 is a solidly built tablet. The screen is bright and crisp. The Jelly Bean ver­sion of Android is a very good improve­ment from Gin­ger­bread, and even smoother than the devices I’ve seen with Ice Cream sand­wich. Though the few glitches I’ve expe­ri­enced con­cern me, I don’t think the Nexus 7 is an inher­ently flawed device.

Here’s the rub for me. The 7″ size would seem­ingly appel to most peo­ple, because it’s more portable and eas­ier to hold than a 10″ tablet. That just doesn’t hold up for me. Maybe my opin­ion will change after a few more weeks, but right now the Nexus 7 just feels too small. Per­haps it’s because I had been using a 13″ Mac­Book Pro most of the time. Shrink­ing the screen down six inches is pretty dra­matic for most of the read­ing that I do online or in Feedly. Addi­tion­ally, while the key­board on the Nexus 7 is really nice, I’ve found that I can­not type as well as I do on a phys­i­cal key­board. What this means for me is that the Nexus 7 is truly a media con­sump­tion device, not some­thing that can serve as a stand-in for a lap­top. I’m not sug­gest­ing that Google is mar­ket­ing the Nexus 7 as a lap­top replace­ment — the push has been all about media con­sump­tion. Let’s be hon­est, though, more and more peo­ple use iPads and other tablets in lieu of laptops.

If you think a 10″ tablet is too large, but don’t want some­thing dumbed down, the Nexus 7 is prob­a­bly a great tablet for you. For $200, I am hard-pressed to name any­thing else on the mar­ket that can com­pete. There are rumors that Apple will likely launch an iPad mini this fall. I doubt that it will be in the same price point, though. I sus­pect it to run around $250 to start. If Apple inte­grates a 4G cell radio, the Nexus 7 may be in trou­ble. I don’t mind the absence of a cell radio. WiFi is enough, and works just fine for me.

I hate to sound like I’m luke warm about the Nexus 7, but I am left won­der­ing after a week whether I really need this device. I guess, if noth­ing else, I have a nice small tablet that is good to have around the house as well as a light­weight device to add to my bag when trav­el­ing. I have been on the fence about e-books, but I have a cou­ple loaded on the Nexus 7. I am going to give one a try to see how I like the read­ing expe­ri­ence. Some­thing tells me that I will still pre­fer read­ing books printed on paper. We’ll see.

So, there you have it. If you have any ques­tions about the Nexus 7, please ask in the com­ments. I am more than happy to answer, and com­pare the Nexus 7 to other tablets. (I’ve played around with just about all of them.)