In my Nexus 7 ini­tial impres­sions piece, posted over the week­end, I was a bit crit­i­cal of Google Now. I made a point of car­ry­ing the Nexus 7 with me every day to see if Google Now would “learn” from my move­ments. I did not have an active WiFi sig­nal dur­ing the day at work, but the Nexus 7 does have GPS built in, so I assumed that it would keep track of my move­ments. Sadly, it didn’t do that. I made a point of con­nect­ing the Nexus 7 to my phone, via a 3G WiFi hotspot, when I trav­eled to Atlanta last Fri­day. While Google Now did rec­og­nize where I was, and offered a travel time map — that map was not con­nected with my des­ti­na­tion within Atlanta. It merely pro­vided the dri­ving time from Hartsfield/Jackson to down­town Atlanta.

Today, I made a point of keep­ing the 3G WiFi hotspot active through­out the day. I unlocked the Nexus 7 this after­noon and Google Now dis­played some cards that I hadn’t seen before.

As you can see, at the top of the Google Now screen is a card with an esti­mate of my com­mute time to home. What’s inter­est­ing about the traf­fic card is that it appears to know that I don’t take the Wash­ing­ton Belt­way home in the evenings because of traf­fic. I do travel the Belt­way in the morn­ings, so I will keep an eye on what the card dis­plays tomor­row morning.

Next up is the weather card. This cards is nor­mally at the first card in the stack.

Below the weather is where things got inter­est­ing. There is a card dis­play­ing trans­porta­tion (bus) sched­ules for the bus stop near my office. Below the trans­porta­tion card were sev­eral cards for busi­nesses near my office, includ­ing Whole Foods, LA Fit­ness, and a cou­ple of restau­rants. The cards dis­played oper­at­ing hours, and gave me the option to get more infor­ma­tion or check in.

One card that I swiped away before tak­ing the screen cap­tures was a place card for the movie the­ater I went to on Sat­ur­day. Inter­est­ingly, I searched for movie times with the Nexus 7, but did not take the tablet with me. While I am a lit­tle puz­zled about why my flight searches didn’t pro­duce a card, it’s pretty cool to see that Google Now is try­ing to inter­pret my searches and cre­ate, poten­tially, rel­e­vant cards.

I don’t know if keep­ing the WiFi con­nec­tion open was the key for the addi­tion of these new cards, but the appear­ance of these new cards is very encour­ag­ing. If improve­ment of cards dis­played on Google Now is con­tin­gent on hav­ing an Inter­net con­nec­tion, than I now more fully under­stand why Josh Topol­sky on The Verge stated that he felt that Google Now was much more use­ful on the Galaxy Nexus than on the Nexus 7. The Galaxy Nexus has a con­stant con­nec­tion, where as the Nexus 7 needs access to WiFi to update data on many, if not all, of the cards.) I plan to take the Metro (sub­way) and/or the bus to work a few days this week. I’d like to see if the trans­porta­tion card starts to add depar­ture times for the Metro sta­tion clos­est to my office.