Google Nexus 7 Tablet is out.

Google’s Nexus 7 Android Tablet is here. The tablet is built by ASUS, which really makes me won­der what Google plans to do with Motorola Mobility.

google nexus 7 tablet

The Nexus comes fully packed with goodies:

• It runs the lat­est Android OS 4.1 Jelly Bean, which is opti­mized for smaller tablet screens, mag­a­zines and movies.
• 1280x800 IPS dis­play coated in “scratch-resistant glass.“
• Front-facing, 1.2-megapixel cam­era.
• 198.5 x 120 x 10.45mm case
• Two fla­vors 8GB ($199) or 16GB ($249) of stor­age, plus 1GB of RAM, and NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3 SoC proces­sor. Don’t worry about the Russian-like specs, it sim­ply means it is fast, really fast.
• GPS and Blue­tooth and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, and Micro USB, plus NFC.
• The 7 stands for the tablet’s size, 7 inches, which as I have said many times, it is the per­fect size for a truly portable device.
• Accelerom­e­ter, mag­ne­tome­ter, and a gyroscope.

The Nexus 7 seems, at least on paper, the ulti­mate Kin­dle Fire killer if it ever ships! Lenovo, with its incred­i­bly ter­ri­ble cus­tomer ser­vice and tech sup­port doesn’t need a com­peti­tor to kill itself. I believe the iPad will remain the global tablet leader through the next 3–5 years, but it will start los­ing some sig­nif­i­cant mar­ket share. Apple’s biggest advan­tage has been the App Store which now has more than 650,000 down­load­able appli­ca­tions that include games, news and travel tools for the iPhone and iPad. Google has been catch­ing up and Google Play (pre­vi­ously known as Android Mar­ket) cur­rently offers more than 500,000 apps.

We just updated our wildly pop­u­lar chart to include Google’s brand new sys­tem. Here are the side-by-side specs (click on it twice to see it full-res):

Google Nexus 7 side by side specs

 
UPDATE: July 9, Is Google sell­ing the Nexus 7 at a loss?

Source: eduardoangel.com

How to optimize your reading experience.

Shock­ing but true: Once upon a prim­i­tive time, there were no ebooks. For the past 15 years or so I’ve read an aver­age of 50 books per year, or roughly one book per week. Now, my annual aver­age is close to dou­ble this number—all thanks to ebooks, and, more specif­i­cally, because of the Kin­dle reader app and the pub­lic library system.

If I buy a book, I’ll read it 20% of the time, since I always use the “I’ll read it tomor­row or next week­end” excuse.

If I check out a phys­i­cal book from the pub­lic library, I’ll read it 50–60% of the time. This sit­u­a­tion has an added bonus—since it takes time and effort to pick up and drop off the library books, I make sure that I only get the ones that I really want or need to read.

For the past six months I’ve been get­ting ebooks in the Kin­dle for­mat, from both the pub­lic libraries in Man­hat­tan and Brook­lyn (for some odd rea­son they work as sep­a­rate enti­ties) and from Google and Amazon’s vast selec­tion of free ebooks. I am read­ing them (and this means fin­ish­ing them) about 80% of the time. So, not only have I dou­bled my annual read­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity, but I am fin­ish­ing 80% of the books I check out as opposed to 20% of the books that I buy.

Free ebooks

A few things might explain this sur­pris­ing improvement. First, I carry the books with me all the time, either on my phone, tablet, or lap­top. The Kin­dle Cloud seam­lessly syncs all the books, book­marks, and even high­lighted sec­tions and notes!

Sec­ond, since there is a set dead­line for the book to expire (you can read Kin­dle books for seven or 14 days with NO option to renew) I am fight­ing against time and (mostly) read them in “chrono­log­i­cal” order, which means that I read them by expi­ra­tion date.

Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader

And third, the wait time to get Kin­dle books from the pub­lic library can be REALLY long, espe­cially at the Man­hat­tan branches. Some­times there are 15 copies avail­able and 250 peo­ple wait­ing for them. Since peo­ple can check them out for up to 14 days, the wait to get a book can take years, so it’s best to read it while I have it.

Read­ing on a tablet is visu­ally com­pelling, and highly portable. Noth­ing beats the roman­tic vision of read­ing a great book on a rainy day while seated next to the fire­place in that cabin on the lake. But real­ity is quite dif­fer­ent. Being able to read on long sub­way com­mutes or while wait­ing for a bor­ing pre­sen­ta­tion to end is a godsend.

What’s your take?

Source: eduardoangel.com

Lenovo sucks.

Some of you may remem­ber our hugely pop­u­lar post “7 rea­sons not to buy the Kin­dle Fire” where we listed all the things we wanted to achieve with a new Lenovo tablet. Well, it’s been six months and it seems like a good time to review what has happened.

First things first. Lenovo sucks. That’s the nicest way I can start this arti­cle before I get R-rated. What started off as a lit­tle exper­i­ment turned into one of the most frus­trat­ing and time con­sum­ing pur­chas­ing expe­ri­ences I’ve ever had. Since I received the Lenovo Idea­pad A1 the GPS didn’t work and the Micro SD card became dis­con­nected every so often. Some­times I would lose Wi-Fi con­nec­tiv­ity, and every now and then the tablet would restart magically—but over­all it was working.

Two months ago the Micro SD card died. Since it was the brand new Ama­zon brand, I thought it could be a defec­tive card. Get­ting a replace­ment from Ama­zon was a breeze. The tablet was able to read the card again and I assumed the prob­lem was over. It was, for about two weeks.

After wast­ing more time than I should admit for­mat­ting the card and try­ing every trick in the book, I called Lenovo. After almost one hour of speak­ing with dif­fer­ent tech sup­port employ­ees in India and being trans­ferred sev­eral times to even more clue­less and help­less agents (a process that became the stan­dard), I was given a repair ticket.

I was to send the tablet to Texas (I had to pay one-way ship­ping) and they would fix it in approx­i­mately seven days. The prob­lem? The only app that was work­ing was the Kin­dle Reader, and I was read­ing like never before (read my recent post about how I’m read­ing almost twice as many books now). I was hooked.

It was the per­fect catch-22. One great app was work­ing, I was still able to check email and news, but all the other apps that I needed to work like Ever­note, Google Docs, PDF Reader, and Drop­box required an SD Card. I called again. Would a firmware update fix the issue? “Maybe,” I was told an hour later. Would they keep all the apps I had pur­chased and installed? “We don’t know.” was the very help­ful answer.

Lenovo Repair sucks

Then I ran into another prob­lem. The tablet would not update its own firmware. I tried every­thing: chang­ing the tablet’s set­tings, con­nect­ing to my Mac­Book Pro, installing the firmware teth­ered to a Win­dows XP tower, con­nect­ing a lap­top run­ning Win­dows Vista, nothing.

So, I gave up and sent it in for repair. Two weeks later, I fol­lowed up. They had received it, but they were wait­ing for some parts. An hour later I was told that the parts would arrive in approx­i­mately SIX WEEKS. So let me get this straight. I get a lemon, send it in for repair, have to pay for ship­ping and have to wait two months? I’ll make the rest of the story short. I was finally able to esca­late my case to some­one at “Cus­tomer Advocate/Customer Com­plaint Resolutions/Customer Sat­is­fac­tion Pro­grams” (I am dead seri­ous, this is her title). After three or four phone calls and nine emails she finally gave up and sent me a new Tablet, which I received last week. How long before it breaks? I’ll keep you posted.

Source: eduardoangel.com