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Fuck the haters, Despicable Me is awesome.

And yes, when I picked up and handled my Nex 7 for the first time I thought to myself "this is an iPad mini". I was absolutely flabbergasted that they could push a device of this quality out at the quasi-magical $250 price point.

Then Apple came out with a real iPad mini, and I'm still glad I got the Nex instead. Top-notch in terms of performance, ease of use, portability and clean design.

There are Despicable Me haters? They probably just need banana.

Or they could just go to New York New York Las Vegas and see that stealing the small Statue of Liberty is no small feat...

What with all the security in Vegas casinos, stealing the real one is probably easier.

I should add that Jelly Bean was the first version of Android that I noticed to lose all traces of lagginess and be comparable response-wise to any iPhone or iPad I've used. Apple nailed this UX from the get-go, it took a while for Google to nail this I feel; also perhaps unoptimized Android devices were not helping matters. My HTC and Nexus, both with Jelly Bean are as smooth as, um, butter.

I started with a Nexus One and have purchased 5 android devices altogether. I'd consider myself a Google fanboy, and rely heavily on their service platform.

But the next tablet I get will have to be an iPad or Surface Pro, because I make music and all the tablet-based music software worth talking about is on iOS. Google largely ignored the creative market in developing Android and made no effort to address concerns about latency or similar issues. The only software of note to appear on Android in the last 2 years is Image Line's well-respected Fruity Loops audio/MIDI sequencer, but I'm so jaded that I can't be bothered to install it.

Result? A huge, thriving ecosystem of interoperable audio & MIDI apps on the iPad, with zero incentive to switch back to Android any time in the foreseeable future. Android becomes identified as a consumer-only platform, iOS as a producer platform. The number of musical artists that use an iPad is tiny compared to the overall consumer market, but artists tend to be vocal about the tools they use and are delighted to be seen using them, which I think has about 100x the PR value of any given commercial depicting actors having a good time with their consumer device.

It's a bit surprising that sound latency on Android is as bad as it is. It's not just apps for audio production that suffers, most any kind of audio toy is useless.

For people who want to tinker with audio on Android, it's possible to swap AudioFlinger with PulseAudio[1] for lower latency (20ms vs 176ms)[2], but so far you have to build and flash your own AOSP image, so it's not exactly plug and play.

[1]: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Ports/An...

[2]: http://arunraghavan.net/2012/01/pulseaudio-vs-audioflinger-f...

> but so far you have to build and flash your own AOSP image

I think you're going to see more people doing this, with the Nexus devices and the Transformer tablet. Maybe I've overestimated the popularity of the ASUS-branded hardware, but I have always had the best of luck with my TF-101 getting current ROMs and updates from the third-party vendors like TeamEOS.

Now that TeamEOS is gone, there's a void, so more people are probably going to learn to build the ROMs. There are even people picking up the torch[1] with the TeamEOS source code, taking their branches and picking up where they left off.

I know as consumers, we all want vendors to support their products... but as members of Open Source community, I see it's irresponsible to depend on them exclusively for forward motion, progress, and updates, and for freedom's sake it shouldn't be an impossible proposition to compile and flash your own ROM. (Just think if you bought an x86 computer with Ubuntu or Fedora and you couldn't re-OS it.)

[1]: https://github.com/timduru/

That's great to hear. Apple have always targeted content producers (music/video/graphics/...?) and I'm glad that this has carried over to their tablets.

I hope in time that Android gets the same amount of attention because those apps will eventually bolster the Linux ecosystem in general. It's great to hear that Fruity Loops is available for Android, I remember a Mac-head showing me an early version of it like 15 years ago! Ouch, I feel old.

I constantly hear people make this claim, but in my experience, it is not true. I have owned tons of Android devices and they have really gotten a lot smoother and responsive, especially with 4.1/4.2 releases, but they still don't come close to iOS.

I have tried tons of different roms on the Galaxy Nexus and the factory roms on the One X, One, and S4, but they just don't have the iOS level of smooth.

Agreed. I have never once experienced iOS level smoothness from my Note II, and I've run both stock TouchWiz 4.1 and a CM 10.1 4.2 variant called Liquidsmooth.

Android is great, I wouldn't trade back to iOS for the world, but I've just learned to accept the hiccups, lag and odd behavior that hurts my "suspension of belief" (or whatever term describes the ability to believe that we're actually 'moving' things by touching a screen).

I just flashed 4.3 onto my Nexus 4, and I'm happy to say those annoying hiccups are virtually non-existent now! They really bothered me before. Chrome and Facebook were the apps I most noticed the stuttering in.

Are you sure this is not only due to the fact that you've flashed a new rom (you say flash so it's not OTA, I suppose) so the system is freshly installed?

I should try it on my Nexus S that has become sluggish as hell (and I've tried different custom roms)

The thing about the Galaxy Nexus is that it's essentially a Samsung Galaxy sII but with 2.4x more pixels to push with the same GPU.

There are some optimizations that iOS can make that Android can't, but the gnex in particular I think is slightly crippled.

I don't want to over-generalize based on one data point, but on my Galaxy Nexus I noticed that 4.2 pretty handily undid all of the improvements that 4.1 managed in this arena. It was indeed a paradise of smoothness for that one point release, though.

I'll be building 4.3 for the gnexus after it syncs, so we'll see how it is.

Anyone wondering, it's performing faster than 4.2 on the gnexus imho. Battery life is the same though. Superuser is problematic unless you undo a change in one of the /davlik files[1]. That makes the system partition mount without nosuid as it did before Android 4.3. The other solution is uglier, using SuperSU (which is closed source) and runs as a hacky service that most apps are not compatible with yet.

[1] https://android.googlesource.com/platform/dalvik/+/9907ca3cb...

IMHO 4.2 should never have been shipped for the Galaxy Nexus. Just too slow. I upgraded to a Nexus 4 and 4.2 is fine there, but will 4.4 be fine? Nobody knows.

I did not notice that. You could very well be right. It'd be nice if Google could release some cold hard performance figures. Maybe I could, er, Google it.

Since I got my ipad mini, I have not really used my nexus, only for debugging my apps. The battery, screen, speed and so were all worse, and I never got used to the os as much as I have for iOS.

If I didn't need an android tablet, I probably would not have one.

Uh, the iPad Mini's screen is 1024-by-768/163 PPI. The first-gen N7's is 1280x800/216 ppi. The N7's screen is noticeably nicer.

I can't speak to battery or speed as I haven't had a lot of hands-on time with the Mini, but I will note that the N7's slimmer aspect ratio means it fits nicely in a pocket, while the iPad Mini just plain doesn't.

Resolution is not the only criteria to judge a display. Color accuracy, calibration, contrast, gamma, viewing angles are also important.

I have both devices and I can comfortably say Nexus 7's display is much worse. Images appear washed out, it's not as bright as the iPad mini, it has worse viewing angles etc.

Screen "niceness" constitutes far more factors than just DPI.

It could be contrast ratio, colour gamut, brightness, subpixel quality, viewing angles, reflectivity of coating, susceptibility to oils/fingerprints...

(I haven't used either, I'm just saying)

I've used both. I prefer the Mini's screen to the old N7: larger viewing angles, better color saturation/accuracy, less backlight bleed, smaller bezel.

The iPad Mini Retina will likely be the perfect small tablet for most users.

I just can't look past the poor resolution of the iPad mini - and on that basis alone, I would not recommend it to anyone, except people with very poor eyesight. I agree that DPI isn't everything. I think of it as like "stock" to a soup. Without stock (or with awful stock), you have no soup. The rest of the ingredients are important, but stock is king. iPad mini has foul tasting "stock" ;) Brightness is important, but not fundamental, viewing angles are less important when you're looking straight on or from a slight angle (ie. 99% of the time). I didn't notice a huge difference on contrast ratio (eg. differentiating dark colours readily). I would not recommend the current iPad mini to anyone with reasonable eyesight.

> viewing angles are less important when you're looking straight on or from a slight angle (ie. 99% of the time).

I find that with the ipad mini viewing angles actually do seem kind of important, because—unlike a phone—I very often use the ipad mini without holding it, whether sitting on a table, on my lap, or propped up against something while I watch a video. The result is that one doesn't have nearly the same easy control over viewing angle one has when hand-holding a device...

And what's the price difference? :P

Yeah, this is the thing I could never get my head around. I know that the iPad mini is superior in many ways, but I just can't see how people can justify spending the extra money! The iPad mini is £110 - £190 more expensive, depending on which size you get. That's just too much IMHO.

iOS is user-friendlier in the start, that's true.

Android indeed has a "bigger" learning curve which make people more efficient in a short time for doing things with their phone/tablet.

Easy example, Tasker, Gravity screen, NFC and Autovoice...

The original Nexus 7 is known to have extremely poor color calibration.[1][2] Both the Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 look terrible to me, everything is very blue-looking. I took a look at a Kindle Fire HD and a Nexus 7 at a store and the difference is immediately obvious.

I can't stand seeing pixels, so the iPad Mini is not an option, but I'm also not willing to spend money on a tablet with lousy color. Hopefully Google gets it right this time.

[1] http://www.displaymate.com/news.html#8 [2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57479059-94/expert-claims-g...

That's like saying that all 8MP sensors are better than all 5MP sensors just because they stuff more pixels on the sensor. Of course, that's not true.

Compare any two items in the same category that are 65% apart in price and it probably wouldn't make a lot of sense to choose the cheaper one.

16GB Nexus 7 is $269, 16GB iPad mini is $329, the difference is 20%.

The updated 16GB Nexus 7 is $229. That's a 30% difference.

You're also missing the fact that until this update, the Nexus 7 16GBs were only $199, which is a whopping 40% difference.

My mistake, I looked at the price in the Play Store and looked at the wrong one.

No worries! I completely understand.

Actually, the story says that the 16GB nexus 7 is $229, so the iPad mini is 44% more expensive.

The version of the Nexus 7 I was speaking of is $199 or less (Amazon even has the 32GB for $199 right now). The new version is a little more expensive at $229, but blows the specs of the iPad Mini out of the water.

I'm very happy with mine too - I only got it after I bought a dirt cheap 7" Android device for testing purposes (a client was reporting issues on one of their applications with users who were using Android devices) and realised that "if this wasn't dog slow and had higher resolution it would be the perfect thing for some of my work/play needs".

I have noticed it seems to be feeling slower over time, though not so much so that I've made an effort to look into it, particularly when starting larger apps or updating apps in the background while doing something else.

The original Nexus 7 filesystem drivers weren't issuing TRIM commands when deleting files, so write performance became much slower (in some cases, <1MB/s). LagFix is a rooted app to fix it, and there are alternatives for non-rooted devices as well.

http://www.howtogeek.com/164106/why-is-my-nexus-7-so-slow-8-...

My solution (which includes some steps described ITA) after struggling for while: 1) get rid of multiple users 2) free up a lot of space 3) run ForeverGone.

#1 was a step backwards, but so was horrible performance. Now things are running smoothly.

I noticed my Nexus 7 getting very slow, found this same information, and ran ForeverGone. There was no noticeable improvement. I then did a factory reset. It may have been a bit snappier at first, but within a couple days it was slow again.

Mostly, I noticed jerkiness and lag scrolling web pages. I'm not sure what I'll do now. Between that and a huge stuck pixel that won't go away, I regret buying this Nexus 7, which was my second one after the screen broke on my first.

I got a dirt cheap clone (I don't remember how much exactly ) from a Chinese reseller from Amazon UK and the screen was crap ^shudder^ and the touchscreen had a glitch ^double shudder^ but it was Android and it was reasonably quick.

These things you really need to try before you buy.

There's another thread here about the potential slowdown issue. Same'll happen to a Mac or PC I reckon after a while. I've not noticed it. When you think about it Android tablets are pretty new so they haven't been used to their full extent, nor to the end of their lifespan.

Aye, the cheap one is fine for the specific purpose (testing those issues in the stock android browser an a cheap device) but would be infuriatingly slow for my day-to-day use of the Nexus 7. The slowdown I've noticed is only really when I'm asking it to do more than one thing at once (usually updating apps while browsing heavy pages or stating other apps) which is fairly rare anyway so I'm not particularly concerned ATM.