Google has taken the covers off the new Nexus 7 and it looks like a winner. The unit is made by Asus again and is 2mm thinner, almost 6mm narrower and 50 grams lighter than its predecessor.
The first noticeable upgrade is the the screen. It sports far more pixels in the same amount of real estate. It’s going from 1280-by-800 pixels and 216 pixels per inch to 1920-by-1200 pixels and 323ppi, giving it true HD resolution! Google claims it to be the highest-resolution 7″ tablet to date.
The tablet has a 1.2-megapixel in the front and a 5-megapixel camera in the back
Plus it is faster than the old version. The new tablet has a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor with 1.8x the computational power of the old one. It has double the RAM — 2GB — which should also boost performance. It has HDMI output for TV hookups, wireless charging and NFC, and supports Bluetooth Smart (aka Bluetooth Low Energy), providing compatibility with the coolest, most power-efficient Bluetooth add-ons.
Google says that the more potent features haven’t hurt battery life. Actually, it’s claiming an extra hour of performance: up to nine hours of streaming video or ten hours of web browsing.
The revamped Nexus 7 is the first Android device to ship with Android 4.3 Ice Cream Sandwich, a fairly minor-sounding operating-system upgrade with features such as multiple user profiles with varying levels of access and new copy protection which Netflix uses to stream video at 1080 resolution. It also has access to Google Play Games, a new Google App Store focused on games to take on the TegraZone store from NVIDIA.
Sadly all these upgrades do have a cost. Instead of starting at $199, it’s a $229 tablet now. the base unit sports 16GB of storage. For $269, you can upgrade to a 32GB model; for $349, you can buy a 32GB unit with unlocked 4G LTE which works on AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. The wi-fi-only models will be available on July 30 from the Google Play store and will be available at retail stores. Right now Google Say the LTE one will follow “in the coming weeks.”
