Nexus 7

I’m loving my new Nexus 7.  I’m sitting in Casa Cappuccino drinking coffee and updating my blog.  It’s a significant improvement over my old Playbook, for a number of reasons.

Firstly the on screen keyboard is better.  A physical keyboard is always going to be more efficient than a touchscreen, but I’m finding that typing seems a lot more fluid on this than the playbook.   I’m making less errors, the autocorrect is smarter, and editing existing text is easier. I’m not convinced by gesture typing yet, but with a bit of practice it could be quite handy.

Second, being part of the android ecosystem means there are way more available apps than on the playbook.  The nexus 7 is a very nice portable movie viewer, for example.

Third, it’s very accessible as a development platform.  It didn’t take long for me to go through the android tutorials and write, build and deploy my first application to the device.

On the downside, I miss the smooth integration with iTunes that I’m used to on iOS devices, and I’m frustrated that Greek fonts don’t render correctly.  I love the youVersion bible application, and I wish I could switch easily between the English text and the Greek.

That said, this is definitely the nicest mobile device I’ve used so far, and is significantly cheaper than the iPad mini.  Strongly recommended.