When my neighbor got the very first iPad, I ran to his apartment to finally see in person what I had been reading about it in the news. I remember holding it, turning the screen on and thinking “this is just a big iPod”.
But as time went by, I continued to see how this device was becoming a class of its own thanks to the amazing applications that were being written for it. I however was waiting for the gadget to evolve and let companies iterate the concept. I was specially eager to see what Android would bring to the tablet environment.
This week I finally caved in. After reading about it for weeks, I purchased a Google Nexus 10. Here are my first impressions.
The Good
The tablet is thin and light. Once you turn it on, you upgrade to the newest version of Android — Jelly Bean 4.2 — and all the staple applications that have become the Google ecosystem: Gmail, Calendar, Talk, and the Play Store. As you sign in, you’ll see all your Android graph magically imported to the tablet, providing a fast on-boarding process.
A cool thing that the new OS brings is its multi-user support. That means I can share the tablet with my wife without mixing our apps. Each user has his own folder and settings, i.e. wallpaper, widgets, installed apps, etc.
Websites really look sharp, the fonts, the images; everything takes a new life. I also loaded up Amazon’s Kindle App and can see myself reading for hours in this thing.
The tablet is fast and reacts instantly to gestures. There are times here and there where the CPU seems to be doing some background operations where the response is not as crisp, but those are very few instances.
I loaded the “Brave” trailer from Google Movies and was simply blown away. The animation looked 3D without the glasses, with textures and colors really jumping at you. Can’t wait to see “Scott Pilgrim” on this tablet!
The Bad
The love phase began to break up when I started to notice that some applications wouldn’t install (see Flipboard below). There are many like this, including some of the ones I use the most. This brought a sour taste in my mouth.
And this is not the only problem with apps. Most of them look completely horrible, as they are designed to be run on a cellphone, not on a tablet. One of the most glaring examples: the Twitter app. It appears to have been run over by a steamroller. Having said that, the Google applications do look amazing and use the tablet’s space really well. One great example is Gmail: I like it more in the tablet than in the Desktop. Also the Calendar, Google+ and Currents apps look amazing. I also was blown away by the sample magazines included as part of the Play Magazines. Unfortunately my favorite magazine, The New Yorker, is not included. I also downloaded The New York Times app and frankly want to delete it already.
Another aspect that I still haven’t gotten used to is typing on the tablet. I can type tweets and maybe a short email. But writing a blog post like this one seems impossible at the moment. I do think this is a problem in tablets in general, and not necessarily a problem with the Nexus 10. I think the keyboard is way too big, and even though the new OS includes its own version of Swype, it makes no sense to me to use it on the tablet.
The Bottom Line
There was a part of me that thought about returning the tablet — you have 15 days to return it to Google if you don’t like it. But then I remembered when I got my first Android phone and how there were no good apps for it. But slowly all the good apps started coming and in no time I felt like I had the best phone in the world.
If you care about apps and having a mature app ecosystem, I definitely recommend you get an iPad. It’ll cost you $100 more, but it’ll be worth it. I think Google is making the tablet more accessible to be able to develop a more interesting ecosystem for developers to write and/or port apps to it.
In my personal case, I will happily use the web versions of the apps I miss, and will wait a bit to see what awesome things Android developers bring to the Nexus 10.
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