There are plenty of reviews enumerating the Google Nexus 7‘s impressive specs, its obvious deficiencies and compromises, and flippant comparisons to the bigger and vastly more expensive iPad. Instead of rehashing these topics, this blog post concentrates on the experience of using the device.
I have carried a computing device of some manner or other about my person for close to two decades. In high school, it was the HP 95LX and 200LX DOS-based palmtops. In college, it was a succession of clamshell and “Palm-size PC” Windows CE devices, which eventually merged what was then called “PDA” functionality with that of a mobile phone. By this time, mobile computing and cell phones were becoming less of a niche, and this gave way to today’s widespread adoption of smartphones, tablets, and other specialty devices.
While a fair amount of software was available for these legacy devices, their utility was not really comparable to modern devices – without a wireless data connection, most would sync to a PC via a wired serial cable for calendar and contact updates – if that. As such, one of their primary functions was to provide mobile access to so-called “personal data” as a replacement for Read More…