Posts Tagged: tablet

my nexus 7 got jacked

On 2 August 2012 by matthew With 11 Comments - culture, google, tablets, technology

—> UPDATE <—

At some point this evening, between the Ver­i­zon Wire­less store and Qdoba, both in Rockville, MD, some­one stole my brand new Nexus 7. If you’ve been read­ing my blog in the last week or so, you know how much I went through just to get the damned thing. Now it’s gone. I didn’t even real­ize that the Nexus 7 was gone until I got home. I hold myself account­able because I left the tablet out of my back­pack on the back seat. (I am also kick­ing myself for not enabling the lock screen on the Nexus 7.) Clearly, I must have left the doors to the car unlocked, because the win­dows are in tact and there was no force­able entry.

Of course, once I dis­cov­ered that I had been jacked, I scram­bled to change every con­ceiv­able pass­word, dis­able Google Wal­let, and offered up a gen­er­ous heap­ing of curse words for the new owner of my Nexus 7. I also pushed the Plan B app to the Nexus 7 in the hopes that if some­one con­nects the device to a WiFi net­work, I will be able to see its where­abouts. If it’s on a wire­less net­work long enough, I can let the police know.

[deep breath]

I am really bummed about this; but I admit that part of me won­ders if it just wasn’t meant to be. Per­haps all the has­sles with ship­ping were an omen that I should have heeded.

Lar­ceny sucks!

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update: google follow-through

On 1 August 2012 by matthew With 0 Comments - google, tablets, technology

In life, it is impor­tant to give credit where credit is due — par­tic­u­larly when some­one makes good on cor­rect­ing a mistake.

Respon­sive­ness and thought­ful actions are how com­pa­nies build loyal cus­tomers. Good on Google for refund­ing my ship­ping fees. Now let’s see if UPS fol­lows Google’s lead, and refunds my $40 for the less-than-effective MyChoice service.

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the nexus 7 — first impressions

On 29 July 2012 by matthew With 1 Comments - google, tablets, technology

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.)

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the nexus 7 — ownership hurdles

On 23 July 2012 by matthew With 11 Comments - google, tablets, technology

Order Placed

Google stated in the announce­ment of the Nexus 7 that the tablet would be shipped/available “mid-July.”

Google’s Order-Fulfillment Clus­ter F*ck

As noted above, I placed my order on the Google Play store within 30 min­utes of the announce­ment of the Nexus 7 at the Google I/O devel­oper con­fer­ence. A charge was autho­rized on my card. (It was only later that I dis­cov­ered that that amount was never processed.) Fast for­ward sev­eral weeks later, and rumors started to sur­face that GameStop, Ado­rama, and Office Depot had received ship­ments of the tablets. Accord­ing to reports on Fri­day, July 13th, retail­ers were specif­i­cally told not to sell or release of of the devices. Nev­er­the­less, GameStop has been hand­ing out Nexus 7s to any­one that pre-ordered, as well as a few that hadn’t. There were a num­ber of peo­ple who were run­ning around with their hair on Fri­day, July 13th. (I’m not super­sti­tious.) My out­rage was more tem­pered and focused than many I saw going apoplec­tic online. My ire was not directed at GameStop, or those who were able to get their Nexus 7 tablets at retail stores before those of us that ordered through the Google Play store. No, my annoy­ance is directed squarely at Google.Come on Google. What a shitty way to treat cus­tomers who fol­lowed your encour­age­ment to order through the Play store!

This is the mes­sage that Google deliv­ered on Twit­ter Fri­day, July 13th.

Of course, yours truly, and prob­a­bly a num­ber of other peo­ple, are not on Twit­ter. Was it too much for Google to send an update email to all of the peo­ple that placed pre-orders through the Google Play store? Fri­day the 13th came to a close with absolutely no word about ship­ment from Google. Bummer!

Appar­ently, the Pony Express finally reached Google’s head­quar­ters with the news of con­sumer out­raged about the bun­gled release of the Nexus 7. The fol­low­ing mes­sage was posted on the Google Play store sup­port page on Tues­day, July 17.

An update on Nexus 7 pre-order ship­ping sta­tus
We’ve had incred­i­ble demand for our new Nexus 7 tablet and are ship­ping them as quickly as pos­si­ble. When your device ships you will receive a noti­fi­ca­tion from Google Play with a ship­ping track­ing num­ber. We will have all orders placed through July 13 processed and shipped soon. Orders placed after July 13 will ship accord­ing to the quoted time­frame when you pur­chased and we will update you with a track­ing num­ber when we’ve shipped. Thanks for your patience.

Below are more spe­cific details by coun­try for devices ordered through July 13. If the below infor­ma­tion is not true for you, and you ordered on or before July 13, please reach out to our sup­port team so we can investigate.

In the US:

We’ve shipped all stand­alone Nexus 7 8GB orders (e.g.: those with­out a case, charger or Nexus Q). By the end of day on July 19 (PDT), we will have shipped all stand­alone Nexus 7 16GB orders placed through July 11 (PDT), and upgraded these orders to overnight ship­ping. We will process the remain­ing stand­alone Nexus 7 16GB orders by the end of next week with overnight shipping.

If you ordered your tablet with a case, charger or Nexus Q, your Nexus 7 will ship this week with overnight ship­ping, in some cases ahead of the rest of your order. But don’t worry, the rest of your order will be on its way soon.

In Canada:

We’ve shipped all Nexus 7 8GB orders. We are in the process of ship­ping Nexus 7 16GB orders and will ship them in 1–2 weeks.

In the UK:

All Nexus 7 8GB orders will ship by July 20 (BST). All Nexus 7 16GB orders placed through June 30 (BST), will ship by July 20 (BST). The remain­ing Nexus 7 16GB orders will ship next week.

In Aus­tralia:

All Nexus 7 8GB and Nexus 7 16GB orders will be ful­filled by the end of day on July 19 (AEST) and will arrive in 3–5 days.

My Odyssey With UPS

I was greeted Sat­ur­day morn­ing, July 14, with an email from Google, sent at 3:33 am.

My excite­ment about receiv­ing a ship­ping noti­fi­ca­tion was tem­pered by the fact that there was not pro­jected deliv­ery date given on the UPS page. There was just a mes­sage that the label had been cre­ated, but UPS had not yet received the pack­age for ship­ping. Inter­est­ing, as you can see from the email, the label was actu­ally cre­ated on Mon­day, July 9. Why did it take six days to actu­ally set the UPS ship­ment process in motion?

I got all excited on Tues­day, July 17, because my UPS ship­ping track­ing page showed the I was due to get my Nexus 7 that day. Womp Womp! The UPS page never updated to show that the tablet was “out for deliv­ery.” I called the UPS store where the Nexus 7 was being shipped, and the guy told me, rather matter-of-factly, that he’s pretty sure that they’re not get­ting any more deliv­er­ies for the day. He fol­lowed by say­ing that I should expect to see it the next day. Incred­u­lous, I con­nected with a UPS rep on its web­site. The rep told me that the pack­age was, indeed, out for deliv­ery and it would arrive at the UPS store before it closed. I left work and decided to camp out in front of the store from about 6:10 on. Just as my hopes began to crum­ble, I see a UPS truck rum­ble up to the store. My heart started to race. The dri­ver go out the truck (spy­ing me look­ing like a puppy in the win­dow wait­ing for mama to open the door) and walked into the UPS store. She came out with a num­ber of pack­ages to be shipped. She put the pack­ages in the back of the truck, got set­tled in her seat, fired up the big brown box, and rolled out. My heart sunk. I got back online with a rep from UPS and was told that the pack­age won’t be deliv­ered until Wednes­day, July 18. I slumped down in the driver’s seat and tried to muster up the energy to drive off — Nexus 7less. Sigh! What’s another day? It’s just around the cor­ner. At that point, I was deflated and sim­ply resigned to wait­ing to see what hap­pened the next day.

Here is a lit­tle some­thing that struck me as bazaar about the han­dling of my pack­age by UPS. Here is the track­ing page updated as of 7 am, Wednes­day, July 18.

First of all, that “Out for Deliv­ery” at 7:47 am on Tues­day, July 17, was not listed all day. That must have been added overnight Tues­day. Inter­est­ingly, if the pack­age was, in fact, out for deliv­ery on Tues­day, July 17, why didn’t it reach Rockville? Why is there a depar­ture scan from the same loca­tion, Lan­dover, at 7:59 pm? Did the pack­age ride around in the truck all day and then come back? Why was it sent to Lau­rel, and the returned to Lan­dover? In fair­ness, UPS would tell you that my ship­ment was 2nd Day Air, and Wednes­day is still within the promised second-day deliv­ery. I don’t dis­pute this time­line, but if the pack­age was out for deliv­ery on Tues­day, why wasn’t it deliv­ered? What Brown Can Do For Me is answer some questions.

If you’re not famil­iar with the Wash­ing­ton, DC met­ro­pol­i­tan area, Lan­dover (A on the map) and Lau­rel (B on the map) are not that far from each other — about 15 miles. The UPS Store in Rockville, MD, where my pack­aged is to be shipped, is about the same dis­tance from Lan­dover than is Lau­rel. If noth­ing else, I will have a well-traveled Nexus 7.

Wednes­day, June 18 was sup­posed to be “The Day.” I checked in around 11 am, and was told by the UPS web­site and by rep­re­sen­ta­tives on the phone that the pack­age was, indeed, out for deliv­ery. I checked with the UPS Store, and the per­son told me that they received their pack­age drop off, and there was noth­ing for me. I called UPS to inquire, and some­how the story change. One per­son told me that the pack­age was out for deliv­ery. Another per­son said that it appears that the pack­age is still sit­ting in Lan­dover. Or was it. I spoke to some­one at the UPS facil­ity and Lan­dover and she said, in no uncer­tain terms, that they didn’t know where the pack­age is. WTF?!

Come again! UPS scans every­thing. How on the world could a pack­age go miss­ing??? Per­haps because I was still hope­ful that I might receive my pack­age on Wednes­day, I was patient than I might nor­mally be with con­flict­ing answers and matter-of-fact cus­tomer ser­vice. Late Wednes­day, I was trans­ferred to some­one in the “inves­ti­ga­tions unit” of UPS. A very pleas­ant woman walked through my dilemma, and she revealed that the pack­age had, for the last two days, been rid­ing around in a truck for deliv­ery in DC. Because the pack­age was sup­posed to be redi­rected, the dri­ver — for two days — scanned the pack­age and real­ized that it was not sup­posed to be deliv­ered to my house. The dri­ver would bring this pack­age back to the Lan­dover facil­ity, which does not deliver to Rockville to be sent to the Lau­rel facil­ity, which does deliver to Rockville. It appears the pack­age was routed to Lau­rel for deliver to Rockville, but then the machines or a per­son scanned the orig­i­nal label or bar code and sent the pack­age back to Lan­dover. Argh! The UPS rep­re­sen­ta­tive assured me that both the Lan­dover and Lau­rel facil­i­ties were noti­fied about my pack­age. I was annoyed that another day was com­ing to a close with no deliv­ery, but I felt (naively) hope­ful about a Thurs­day delivery.

I was plan­ning to go to New York on Thurs­day after­noon, and I really wanted to have the Nexus 7 with me for the trip. I must admit that I approached the day less hope­ful, because the UPS track­ing page showed the pack­age was yet again in Lan­dover. Hon­estly, I was start­ing to reach a point where I no longer cared. Nev­er­the­less, I called UPS to see what story (read: excuse) they would yarn. What hap­pened to “We Love Logis­tics®?” I was shut­tled from per­son to per­son, demand­ing to speak to managers/supervisors. I became increas­ingly frus­trated because I had to explain my sit­u­a­tion to each per­son. I finally asked, rather angrily, “Don’t you all have/keep notes?” I never really got an answer. It sounds like a call log is kept, but pos­si­bly not much more. After finally blow­ing a gas­ket, I was con­nected to some­one in UPS’s “tracer unit.” (Does that mean that the per­son in the “inves­ti­ga­tions unit” was not really inves­ti­gat­ing? I was told that there was no refer­ral of my sit­u­a­tion to a the investigations/tracer unit. Ugh!) I had to leave to get on a train to New York, but I was told that they would have the super­vi­sor of the dri­ver from the Lan­dover facil­ity call me. Before leav­ing for the train sta­tion, I sub­mit­ted a sec­ond com­plaint, this time online, with Google. About 90 min­utes later, while relax­ing on the train to New York, some­one called me, say­ing that she was from the UPS in DC. The young woman basi­cally told me the same thing I’ve heard for the last three days. This young woman had no answers, but told me that they would call me back once they reached the dri­ver. About 45 min­utes later, I got another call say­ing that the pack­age was, in fact, on the truck for deliv­ery in DC. The dri­ver will bring it back and it will be sent to Lau­rel for deliver to Rockville. I just about burst into flames in my seat.



What Hap­pened to “We Love Logistics®?”


I, qui­etly scream­ing, told her that I’ve been given this same line for the last three days. How can I trust that any­one at these two facil­i­ties is going to get this right? She replied sharply, “LIKE I TOLD YOU…” Whoa! Pump the brakes. Is this chick give me atti­tude? Oh Hell.To.The.Nah! Lucky for her, I was sit­ting a table with three young kids, oth­er­wise she would have got­ten cursed out. Instead, I just said, “Fine. We’ll see if you all can get this right, but I’m not hold­ing my breath. Thank you (sar­casm)!” Click.

On Fri­day, July 20, I received sev­eral emails from UPS indi­cat­ing that they ini­ti­ated a deliv­ery inter­cept on the pack­age — mean­ing it should be routed to Lau­rel for deliver to Rockville. Isn’t that what I did with UPS’s own MyChoice ser­vice? (A ser­vice that costs $40 a year, by the way.) At 11:05 am, I received another email noti­fi­ca­tion from UPS.

Finally!

Just before noon that day, I received a call from a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from UPS. She wanted to make sure that I knew that the pack­age had been deliv­ered. Nice touch, but a lit­tle too late. This track­ing detail sheet almost serves as a sto­ry­board for this story.

This week, I am going to demand that UPS refund the $40 I paid for the MyChoice ser­vice. I have also asked (read: demanded) that Google refund the amount that I paid for ship­ping! I have yet to receive any reply to the two com­plaints that I lodged with them.

This whole thing is the epit­ome of shitty cus­tomer ser­vice.


I don’t want to start a flame war, but I keep think­ing that Apple would never have allowed such a clus­ter f*ck with a prod­uct release. If Google hopes to con­tinue sell­ing prod­ucts directly to con­sumers through the Google Play store, I cer­tainly hope that it has learned some valu­able lessons from the mis­han­dled Nexus 7 release. This whole thing, top to bot­tom, is the epit­ome of shitty cus­tomer service.

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nexus 7 tablet

On 27 June 2012 by matthew With 5 Comments - google, tablets, technology


 
Though it wasn’t a well-kept secret, Google announced the launch of the Nexus 7 tablet today at its devel­oper con­fer­ence, Google I/O. If you are not famil­iar with the Nexus name, Google uses the moniker to des­ig­nate flag­ship Android devices, which (typ­i­cally) run stock Android and are the first to get sys­tem updates.

Though just about every com­pany is try­ing to grab some of Apple’s tablet mojo, it’s no secret that Amazon’s seven-inch Kin­dle Fire, which is pow­ered by Android, was the tar­get. It was recently reported that Ama­zon is expected to release an updated Kin­dle Fire tablet at the end of July.

As the name would sug­gest, the Nexus 7 is a seven-inch tablet. It will run Android 4.1 (Jelly­bean), which was also announced today. The Nexus 7 will come in two mem­ory con­fig­u­ra­tions — 8GG for $199 and 16GB for $249. Here is a short video from Google about the devel­op­ment of the Nexus tablet.

If you’re inter­ested, here is the intro­duc­tion of the Nexus 7 at today’s Google I/O keynote.

SPECS


 
As I men­tioned, Google rolled out the lat­est release of it Android oper­at­ing sys­tem today.

Check out Cnet’s recap of some of the new fea­tures in Android 4.1 — Jelly Bean.

Not want­ing to be left in the dust by Siri, Google has make sig­nif­i­cant enhance­ments to its voice com­mands. (It’s worth not­ing that the voice com­mands on Android devices was already pretty good.) Incor­po­rated with the Jelly Bean OS update will some­thing called Google Now. Here is Google’s teaser video.

Now, for a more prac­ti­cal, real-life per­spec­tive, check out The Verge’s walk­through of Google Now on the Nexus 7. He even fin­ishes with a com­par­i­son of Google Now and Apple’s Siri.


 
GOOGLE PLAY STORE

The Google Play store also received an update. The big news is the avail­abil­ity of mag­a­zines, TV shows, and an expanded library of movie titles.


 

 

UPDATE

I spot­ted a review of the Nexus 7 by Josh Topol­sky this morn­ing on The Verge, and thought that it would be addi­tive to this post.


 
DECISION POINT

I have been think­ing about pick­ing up a tablet for a while. I thought about the iPad, but started to lean away from it only because I will likely buy a Mac­Book Air. That left me think­ing that I would prob­a­bly fare bet­ter with a seven-inch tablet. I must admit that this is a shift for me. I orig­i­nally thought the seven-inch tablets were too small — kinda like a paper­back book com­pared to a hard cover. I’m hard cover kind of guy. With that said, though, I think the size and weight of a seven-inch tablet is more con­ducive to what I’d use it for — read­ing books, mag­a­zine arti­cles, and quick brows­ing. This is some­thing that I’d likely carry in my mes­sen­ger bag. At 12 ounces, it’s much lighter than the 1 1/2 pound iPad, Galaxy Tab, or upcom­ing Microsoft Sur­face. In this size cat­e­gory, the Kin­dle Fire was at the top of my list, but I’ve been hear­ing rumors about Google’s tablet for months. Asus makes good hard­ware, but, quite hon­estly, it is the Nexus badge on this tablet that tipped my hand. As soon as the Google Play store was updated today, I put in my pre-order for the 8GB Nexus 7. It is sched­uled to ship mid-July. Of course, I will def­i­nitely be back here with a “first impres­sions” piece, and fol­low up with a more sub­stan­tive review.

What about you? Are you in the mar­ket for a tablet? Does the Nexus 7 pique your inter­est? Let me know in the comments.

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