Google Nexus 7: Our Favourite Features

If you jumped aboard the pre-order bandwagon a while back you’ll most likely be enjoying life with your new Nexus 7 from Google and Asus. The new tablet is being billed as one of the best around, but what exactly does it offer for its lowly £159 price tag?

In terms of what’s inside the tablet, you get a lot of top notch hardware for your money. An Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor provides plenty of power to play top notch games, the 7-inch IPS display is perfect for reading and watching movies, and the latest Android software is smooth and quick. But there’s more to the Nexus 7 than just hardware – here’s our favourite features:

USB OTG

Connections are extremely limited on the Nexus 7, with only a 3.5mm headphone jack for audio output and a micro USB port for charging and sync. That little micro USB port hides a secret – it’s compatible with the USB ‘On The Go’, or ‘OTG’, standard.

What this means is that with the help of a micro USB to USB adaptor you’ll be able to connect USB peripherals such as mice, keyboards and gamepad controllers to the tablet. One fine example is the PlayStation 3 controller, which we’ve hooked up in order to blast zombies on the awesome Dead Trigger game. These adaptors can be bought for as little as 2 quid from Amazon and eBay.

Google Currents

We’re sure many of you out there have heard of Flipboard, but we doubt as many will have heard about Google’s similar app, called Currents. This app is preinstalled as standard in Android Jelly Bean, and as such is located in the apps menu of the Nexus 7.

Currents allows you to view news from around the world in one place, in all sorts of categories, like a digital magazine of sorts. You can also add in your Google Reader account to view RSS feeds and build up a library of your favourite sites. Best of all, stories can be saved for offline reading, which is perfect as the Nexus 7 doesn’t have 3G connectivity for web on the go.

The Latest and Greatest Games

Thanks to a very fast and very capable quad-core processor, the Nexus 7 will play all the latest games with relative ease. Add to that the fact that it has a brilliantly bright and vivid IPS display, and can be held comfortably in landscape mode with easy access to most onscreen game controls with both hands, and you have a mean portable gaming machine.

USB OTG is supported as we mentioned, which means that various USB gamepads can be used to control some of the best games on Android. So far we’ve blasted through Dead Trigger, The Dark Knight Rises and Shadowgun, all of which run smoothly and are visually very impressive at near-console quality.

NFC

NFC is the latest tech buzzword or buzz feature, and of course the Nexus 7 has it built in. While you don’t get anything other than the NFC chip inside the tablet – some phones these days come with apps and tags you can customise – you can buy almost any NFC tag online from as little as 50p and use a free app from the selection on the Play Store to get yourself started.

NFC tags can be programmed to initiate almost anything on a gadget, meaning that you can set up a tag to turn on Wi-Fi and send an email, or turn on Bluetooth, connect to a speaker and open Spotify to play your tunes. Tags can usually be reprogrammed and effectively repurposed for whatever you want!

Google Now

Google Now is one of the key additions to Android 4.1, and it uses your Google account combined with many of Google’s other services to make your daily life easier. For example, Google searches done on any other device (PC, smartphone, etc) will be picked up by Google Now on your Nexus 7, and it will show you ‘cards’ to help.

For example, we searched screening times at our local cinema on our PC. 30 seconds later, a card pops up in Google Now telling us how long it takes to get there, if there’s any traffic, and an option to view the route in Maps – very helpful. Now can also show you currency conversion and language translation cards if its internal GPS detects that you’re abroad, which we think is amazing.

What’s your top feature?

So far we’re loving the Nexus 7 and Jelly Bean, but there’s much more to explore. If you’ve got your hands on one then why not let us in on your favourite feature? Share it with us by adding a comment below, or hit us up on Twitter @gadget_helpline.

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