Google Nexus 7

Pros Fast. Well-built. Excellent battery life. Well worth the money.

Cons Some third-party apps must be updated for Android 4.3. No HDMI or MHL to connect the tablet to HDTVs. Bottom Line Google's Nexus 7 continues to set the bar for small-screen tablets with a perfect balance between price and performance.

By Sascha Segan Balance. That's the key. Last year's Nexus 7 set the bar for small tablets with just the right balance of features, size, and price. This year, Google and Asus do it again. The new Nexus 7 ($229 direct, or $269 as reviewed with 32GB) balances size, performance, and price to hit the perfectly sweet spot for a small tablet.

Physical Features and Networking
The new Nexus 7 is slimmer, lighter, and more comfortable to hold than the original, which was already more comfortable to hold than the oddly wide Apple iPad mini. This model is 4.5 by 7.9 by .34 inches (HWD) and 10.2 ounces, with tapered sides and a soft-touch back that somehow feels a little classier than the weird faux-leather of the original Nexus 7. Asus still understands that narrowness, more than anything else, is key to making a device you might sometimes want to hold in one hand.

Editor's Note: This is a review of the Google Nexus 7 tablet available on July 30, 2013. For our review of the 2012 Google Nexus 7, see here.

There are very few ports here—just micro-USB, a headphone jack, and a microphone—and narrower, but not very narrow, side bezels framing a sharp 1,920-by-1,200 screen.

The screen is the big advance here. Asus swapped out the Nexus 7's original 1,280-by-800 screen with a gorgeous 1,920-by-1,200-pixel IPS LCD panel. At 323 ppi, it's almost exactly the same density as the Apple iPhone 5's "retina" display and higher than any iPad. It's bright enough for most circumstances, colors are very true, and the viewing angle is good. But it's also small enough that the screen doesn't totally kill battery life. We got 7 hours, 37 minutes of video playback with the screen turned up to max brightness. While that's definitely shorter than the 10 hours that last year's model, with its less-dense screen, commanded, it's still quite respectable.

The Nexus 7 comes in three models. The first two are Wi-Fi only, with support for 802.11a/b/g/n on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands; the support for faster 5GHz Wi-Fi is another upgrade from last year's version. We tested the 32GB Wi-Fi model. The third unit packs more LTE and HSPA bands than I've ever seen: It'll work on Verizon's LTE network and AT&T's and T-Mobile's LTE and 3G networks.

All of the models have GPS, which makes this bright little tablet an absolutely killer in-car navigation system. The GPS on my test tablet locked in very quickly. The tablet also has Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC, although surprisingly there's no support for Google Wallet. Maybe Google Wallet isn't a thing any more.

Performance, OS and Apps
The Nexus 7 is the first Android 4.3 tablet, running a 1.5GHz quad-core Qualcomm S4 Pro APQ8064 processor. Think of it as about two-thirds of the way up the current performance ladder, with the Samsung Galaxy S4 phone at the top. It close to doubles the performance of last year's Nvidia Tegra 3-based Nexus 7 on pure processor and graphics benchmarks and positively crushes the iPad mini on the Geekbench system benchmark: The mini scores only 748, while this guy registers 2,643. The Chrome browser beats the iPad mini on the Sunspider browser benchmark by about 30 percent.

Real-world performance isn't solely dependent on processor speed: It's dependent on how many pixels you're pushing, the OS, and third-party apps. That's where the Nexus 7, running Android 4.3, runs into a bit of trouble. I run the same bunch of Android apps every time I test a tablet, and some of them either didn't show up in the market or got buggy on the Nexus.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted, for instance, had weird graphics artifacts. The UI in Netflix was sluggish, although videos played just fine. Asphalt 7: Heat, one of my standard test games, didn't even show up on a search. Sometimes when searching Google's own Play store, animations would get jittery or the text entry box would lose focus. The popular video player MX Player quit on launch. I suspect a lot of these problems are Android 4.3 issues which will get solved quickly as the app creators update their work.

I didn't see any such problems in Google's other built-in apps, and other apps such as Riptide GP2, Paper Monsters, Dead Trigger, and Photoshop Touch ran just fine. Most importantly, Google's Chrome browser runs very, very well here, as do Netflix and Amazon's Kindle app. I'd still recommend e-ink e-readers to many people because of their near-infinite battery life and sunlight readability, but this will do a great job with children's books and comics.

This has always been Google's struggle with Android tablets: making sure third-party apps are up to speed with the platform. Google has changed the home page of its Play store so only tablet-friendly apps show up, although you can still find "ugly" apps not designed for tablet screens, like CBS's TV.com app, by searching for them. Those apps still don't look too bad on a 7-inch screen; it's really with 10-inch tablets where you run into problems. 

Apple's iPad mini has a superior app experience, it's true. You'll find more and better apps in Apple's app store, and they're pretty much all guaranteed to run smoothly. But the Nexus 7's app situation is good enough for that not to be a deal-breaker.

Android 4.3's other flagship feature makes this an excellent kids' tablet, although not quite as good as the Amazon Kindle Fire with FreeTime. Android 4.2 let you create multiple user accounts on your tablet. Now, "restricted profiles" let you create accounts that can only use certain apps. I created one and found that the restricted account was locked out of the Google Play store. YouTube threw up an error message but worked anyway; all the other apps I allowed my virtual child to use, worked fine.

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