a nursing informatics toolbox

Google Nexus 7-The Best Tablet You Can Get This Holiday Season

google nexus 7

As a nursing informatics consultant, I am on the road or in most cases “up in the air” travelling to wherever my service is needed. The time that I spend driving or making flight connections, makes it unthinkable for me to travel without a tablet. Primarily, I use my tablet computer to read books and watch movies. I had all generations of iPad, I had a Sony Tablet S, Samsung Note, and Asus Transformer Prime. They we’re good tablets but there’s one major problem that bothers me- “weight”. They are heavy!

I believe that the best form factor for an all around tablet computer is a 7 incher. And the best 7 incher out there comes from Google. The venerable first tablet offering from Google’s outstanding Nexus line of product. Manufactured by Asus, it ships with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, and in many cases was the first Android tablet to really come into its own. It’s designed to leverage Google Play as it’s main ecosystem. It syncs your books, music, movies, and other downloaded media from Google Play in the cloud automatically. It also comes with Google Now and Google Chrome. Its innards packs 16GB or 32GB of storage, a 7″ 1280px x 800px display, weighs a mere 12 ounces, sports a 1.2MP front-facing camera, and packs an Nvidia Tegra 3 quad core processor. The Nexus 7 also supports wi-fi, Bluetooth, and NFC, and gets about 10 hours of battery life doing regular tasks. The 16GB Wi-Fi model will set you back $199, the 32GB Wi-Fi model $249, and the 32GB Wi-Fi/Cellular model will put you back $299.

There are 2 main features that set it apart from iPad Mini– price and screen resolution. This baby has sharper display than the iPad Mini, and the price is almost half less than the latter.

If you’re looking at purchasing an Android tablet this holiday season for yourself or as a gift to somebody else, there are plenty on the market to choose from—many more than there used to be, and they’re only getting better. That doesn’t mean all of them are worth your money, or worth buying for someone else who wants a new tablet. I only have two words for you; price and performance. Only Google’s Nexus 7 tablet responds to those attributes. At $199 and the specification it carries, you can never go wrong with it. This is one of the best purchase I did this year.