I got my Nexus 7 on Friday and I've basically had it in my hands since then. It's ridiculous how much I like it. Not in the "this is objectively perfect" way, but in the "Google finally made something I actually want to carry around" way, which is somehow more surprising.
The whole Android tablet market has been this weird joke for years. You get these massive 10-inch things that try to be iPad killers and just end up being awkward and worse at everything. Or you get cheap garbage that's slow and infuriating to use. Meanwhile everyone I know with an iPad is pretty happy, and I'm sitting here thinking about how much money iPad costs.
Then last Friday Google just... released a tablet. Seven inches. Quad-core. 16GB. $199. That's it. No big press event, no "one more thing." Just dropped it and made it available instantly.
Here's the thing nobody expected: the smaller screen is actually better for reading and browsing. I know that sounds obvious but it's not how the tablet wars played out. Everything was about getting bigger, getting closer to laptop territory. The Nexus 7 is small enough that you can hold it one-handed without your arm dying, which means you can actually use it in bed or on the couch without being a contortionist. My iPad-owning friend came over and I watched him physically struggle to hold his own tablet one-handed. That's not a feature, that's a design problem.
The display is ridiculous for the price. 1280x800 on seven inches gives you actual pixel density that doesn't make you want to gouge your eyes out. It's not iPad Retina obviously, but then again it also didn't cost $500. I can actually read text at normal sizes without everything being huge or the text being weirdly blurry.
The software situation is still weird though. Android on tablets is half-baked, let's be honest. Apps are either blown-up phone versions or they don't exist at all. Google's own apps mostly work fine, and the Google Play store now finally has a tablet section so you don't have to dig through phone apps. But it's still a mess compared to iOS. I was reading in browser mode the entire time because most of the tablet apps are garbage.
Performance is snappy though. I played around with some games and they ran great. Tegra 3 processor is handling everything I threw at it without stuttering. Battery lasts most of a day if you're not crazy with it, maybe eight hours of actual use. That's fine. Not amazing, but fine.
Here's what kills me about this: I'm pretty sure Apple is going to respond with a cheaper iPad Mini or something similar. They basically have to. Because once you own a seven-inch tablet that costs $199 and actually works, the justification for a $500 iPad gets harder and harder. I'm not saying the iPad is dead, the iPad is never going to be dead. But this thing exists now and it's good enough that regular people might actually buy it instead of a full-size iPad.
The other thing this does is make all those other Android tablets look even worse. Samsung Galaxy Tab, I'm sorry, but your 10-inch experience is not worth the premium you're asking for when Google is sitting right here with something cheaper and more portable.
I'm still getting used to it. The software quirks are annoying, and I keep reaching for habits from my iPhone that don't quite work the same way. But for $199 I can't complain. If you were on the fence about tablet ownership, you should probably just buy this thing. It's the first Android tablet that I'd genuinely recommend to a non-technical person, and that's saying something.
Google took one look at the tablet market and just decided to make something sensible instead of fighting the iPad directly. Sometimes the right move is to play in your own lane.