Nexus 7 (2013) - Mini Review
by Brian Klug on July 27, 2013 12:54 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Snapdragon
- Qualcomm
- Android
- Mobile
- APQ8064
- Nexus 7
- Android 4.3
The real highlight of the new Nexus 7 is of course the much higher resolution display. At 1920x1200 the Nexus 7 is now the highest resolution 7-inch tablet. This new IPS panel is made by JDI (Japan Display Inc) and boasts better viewing angles, 30 percent more gamut than the previous one, and of course better dot pitch of 323 PPI. Alongside that the new Nexus 7 also doesn’t have the always-on dynamic brightness and contrast (NVIDIA Prism / smartdimmer) that many including myself found frustrating with the original Nexus 7. On the new version the equivalent functions are enabled only during full screen video playback. This is a huge improvement since with the feature enabled on the previous Nexus 7 I always felt that greens were undersaturated and some dynamic range clipped.
I did a lot of asking around about how Google calibrates its panels, and was told that in the case of the Nexus 7 there are two stages. The first is the calibration done by JDI on the panel at a high level, the second is an additional calibration at time of manufacture, per device. This sort of thing is relatively standard, but I’ve always been curious about what stages cost extra money – certainly it’s a baseline expectation for the panel supplier to supply a close-enough LUT, but getting Delta E even lower I’m told requires additional expenditure.
It turns out that the new Nexus 7 is actually very close to sRGB this time around, with overall gamut being just a bit bigger than the sRGB color space. In the GMB Delta-E and saturations Delta-E measures, arguably the two most relevant for color accuracy, the new Nexus 7 is second only to the iPad 4, and better than the iPad Mini in color accuracy, a significant step forwards from its predecessor.
The new Nexus 7 also goes very bright, up to 583 nits, with excellent contrast of 1273. This is again not achieved using any dynamic contrast cheating since those functions are thoughtfully disabled.
On the display side of things I’m very pleased with how far the Nexus 7 has come, and it’s obvious that display quality was a big focus for the 2013 model.
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darkich - Sunday, July 28, 2013 - link
*notebookcheckHere:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Notebook-Laptop-Revie...
RyuDeshi - Sunday, July 28, 2013 - link
Oh man, the Verge's review was a mess, and the video review was even worse.ScruffyNerfherder - Tuesday, July 30, 2013 - link
Heh, yeah, TheVerge is less of a tech site than it is a hipster site that covers tech and gadgets because it is now in vogue. But I don't think most of its readers and readers if other tech-porn sites know any better and mass confusion and lack of tech understanding ensues. I appreciate Anandtech's thoroughness even if it means I have to wait a few days longer to read about it.darwinosx - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
Verge reviews are of pretty uneven quality and the Nexus 7 reviews was just odd.speculatrix - Thursday, August 8, 2013 - link
Indeed. I trust anandtech.com to give accurate information, honest and fair opinions.Also, I trust anandtech to correct errors and respond to comments.
I wouldn't buy a gadget without checking if anandtech had a review or were likely to do one.
fteoath64 - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
The SoC is mis-labelled apparently to not offend handset customers (possibly for the lower prices that Google negotiated). These are Krait 300 cores clocked at 1.5Ghz while the S600 is exactly the SAME cores running at 1.7Ghz. I would say minor speed dip but gpu is quad Adreno 320 which are pretty fast units with OpenGL ES 3.0 support. Great deal on the whole package plus a superb screen!. Shame the bezel on top and bottom are so thick.relativityboy - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
Google will be 'doing right' when they stop creating devices with a super-limited lifespan.No removable memory? Going to be out of space in just a couple years.
No replaceable battery? 300 or so recharges - call it 2 years until your device lasts for about 1hour not tethered to a usb plug.
Google is making stuff that even in the short term, harms the environment far more than better competitors.
Until batteries and memory are user-replaceable, google products are loosers right out the gate.
aNYthing24 - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
This is ridiculous. How many tablets do know that have replaceable memory and replaceable batteries?fokka - Saturday, July 27, 2013 - link
it's not about how many tablets you know that do these things. sure, making the battery replacable on a tablet may not be the most important thing and an engineering challange, but not putting a simple thing like an microsd-reader in it is just a no go in my opinion.Impulses - Sunday, July 28, 2013 - link
On a phone it's debatable IMO, on a tablet it's nowhere near as egregious an omission IMO... USB OTG works well enough and it's more flexible than a microSD slot in some cases anyway.