A Tablet to Rival the Leader

You can love Apple or you can hate Apple, but one thing’s for sure: its favorite game is Lead the Industry. And the industry’s favorite game is Follow the Leader.

Steve Jobs hated the mimicry. Google’sAndroid software “ripped off theiPhone, wholesale ripped us off,” he told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product.”

But there’s a positive aspect to the imitation, too. You could argue that Apple’s copycats fill in markets where Apple dares not tread, or offer an alternative to Apple’s very pure, controlled, choice-constrained world.

In that worldview, Google’s 2012 new-product announcements must seem like a cornucopia of good news. First, Google opened a unified online store with separate tabs for apps, e-books, TV shows, movies and music, modeled on the iTunes store. 

Last week, it introduced the Nexus Q, a black sphere that connects to your TV and plays those songs and videos, pretty much the way the black square Apple TV does. (You can read my review of the Q online atnytimes.com/personaltech.) 

Above all, Google has just introduced the Nexus 7, a shiny black tablet that aims to challenge both the iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire. (Nexus phone, Nexus tablet, Nexus sphere thing; what is Google thinking, anyway? If it truly wants to emulate Apple, it should minimize confusion, not foster it.)

The Kindle Fire’s most important feature is its price: $200. That’s an eye-popper in a world where the dominant tablet, the iPad, costs $500 and up. Of course, the Fire isn’t the same thing as the iPad. Its seven-inch screen is much smaller. It’s thicker and blockier. It doesn’t have a camera, microphone, GPS function, Bluetooth or memory-card slot. Its primary function is playing material you buy from Amazon, like books and video.

But that’s why Google’s tablet, manufactured by Asus, is a ground-shaking arrival. It, too, has a seven-inch screen and costs only $200, but this time, you don’t get any sense that its creators skimped to keep the price down. It’s sleek and beautiful, with rounded edges, unlike the sawed-off rectangular back of the Fire, and a “pleather” back panel that feels great. And it weighs 2.6 ounces less than the Fire, which makes a world of difference. It’s slightly thinner, too, although thicker than the iPad.

More important, the Nexus is a full-blown tablet. It’s almost as capable of letting you create stuff as consuming it. It’s fast, smooth and capable of running any Android tablet app.

So yes, the Google tablet pretty much blows the Kindle Fire’s value proposition into a cloud of ash. But it also undercuts its own Android-tablet competitors. For example, Samsung’s similar seven-inch Android tablet, the Galaxy Tab 2, costs $250 for the same eight gigabytes of memory.

How is Google able to offer a deluxe tablet for the same price as Amazon’s bare-bones one? I asked the Nexus tablet team if it was playing a game of razors-and-blades here, losing money on every tablet with the intention of making money by selling books, movies, music and TV shows. Google concedes it makes no profit when it sells this tablet from its Web site — and therefore it must lose money on each one it sells in a store.

In any case, the Nexus 7 is well-equipped — for a $200 tablet. It has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a nine-hour battery, a bright and very sharp screen, a loud mono speaker and GPS function. A seven-inch Android tablet makes a sensational GPS navigator.

The hardware is missing only a few tidbits. There’s a camera on the front for video calls, but no camera on the back. The battery isn’t removable. There’s no cellular option; you can connect to the Internet only over Wi-Fi. And since there’s no memory-card slot, the built-in eight gigabytes of storage is all you’ll ever have. (You can get a 16-gigabyte model for $50 more.)

What the Nexus 7 has that no other tablet has at the moment, however, is the latest version of Android 4.1, named Jelly Bean. Part of life in Androidland is never knowing whether or not an Android software update will be available for your brand and model.

Jelly Bean offers dozens of new features. For example, swiping your finger up the screen produces the Google Now screen: little “cards” bearing information it thinks you could use right now, based on your location, location history, calendar and Google searches. If you’ve recently searched for a sports team or a flight, for example, you see the latest scores or flight status. Weather, traffic and appointments are also part of this intriguing but only partly baked feature.

You can now save a city’s worth of Google Maps onto your tablet, so that you won’t need an Internet connection to navigate. That’s handy when you travel overseas.

SOURCE / AUTHOR : The New York Times | David Pogue