With its 7-inch screen, the Nexus 7 isn't the largest Android tablet around, and it's considerably smaller than the iPad. Still, its 1,280-by-800 resolution is the same as that of the 10.1-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab. That puts it at 216ppi (pixels per inch) -- less than the 326ppi of the iPad's Retina Display, but noticeably better than the Galaxy Tab's 149ppi. Its colors are perhaps not as vibrant as some screens, but graphics look sharp.
Introducing "Jelly Bean" and mobile Chrome Much has been made of the fact that the Nexus 7 is the first device to ship with the next generation of the Android OS, code-named "Jelly Bean." But "Jelly Bean" is Android 4.1, not 5.0. Most of the changes from Android 4.0 ("Ice Cream Sandwich") are incremental -- though, admittedly, few Android owners have seen that version.
"Jelly Bean" brings some minor UI improvements. It's easier to move and resize widgets on the home screens, and you can group icons into folders to save space. Overall UI animations are smoother, though how much this is attributable to OS improvements and how much to the Nexus 7's quad-core Tegra 3 CPU is hard to say.
"Jelly Bean" features a new, on-device voice recognition engine that integrates with most text-input widgets on the device. The new, voice-integrated Google Search with speech synthesis is clearly designed to compete with Apple's Siri.
Then there's Google Now, a new search app that returns context-sensitive results on "cards." But since the Nexus 7 is Wi-Fi-only, Google Now's location-based searches will be less useful than they would be on smartphones.
The Nexus 7 is also the first Android device to ship with Chrome as its default browser. Chrome for Android isn't the same as desktop Chrome, however. It uses the same build of WebKit to render pages, but many websites still treat it as a mobile browser unless you force them to load their desktop layouts.
The Android version doesn't support Extensions, either, and it doesn't come bundled with Flash. Adobe has said it will not develop a Flash plug-in for this or any future versions of Android, so write that off. In my experience, even some complex HTML websites do not render identically on the Nexus 7 as on the desktop, which may rule out some Web applications.
