Yet did those issues prevent Apple products from getting "stellar reviews"? The article claims that the nexus 7 is getting favorable treatment in the press despite users reporting various problems. Aren't apple products received similarly by the public?
I bought the Nexus7 based on the specs, that it ran the very latest version of Android, that Android is "open" and the cheap $229 price. That said the experience wasn't exactly what I thought it would be. The biggest concern being the Google Play app store. While the most popular apps (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc) were available.. many of the 2nd and 3rd tier apps I'd gotten used to on the iPhone & iPad, simply weren't available for Android tablets. Which meant for tasks like checking XBL I went back to using my iPhone.
I didn't have any issues with GPS, and found Google navigation to work wonderfully. But did immediately notice the jittery scrolling and buggy multitouch. There is a buttery smoothness to navigating ALL Apple devices, and it just isn't there with Android. It doesnt matter how much processor power & ram they pump into.. the OS simply is not as refined. Windows has the same problem. Its something you really do not notice until you go from using an Apple product to an Android/Windows product. A good example would be the trackpad on laptops. Once you use one on a Macbook running OSX.. using anything else (including the same Macbook running Windows) makes the trackpad seem like its fighting you to move around. Like there is too much friction.
The exact same friction thing happened with the Nexus7, almost as if theres an initial millisecond delay before the device recognizes your movement. One of my friends best explained as "dead zone". Apple products have zero dead zone. They recognize the smallest of movements and can be navigated with exact inputs. Android/Windows seems to have a few milliseconds of deadzone before the recognize the same small incremental movements.
Anyways.. with the AllThingsD announcement of a Sept 10th Apple "event" I went ahead and returned my $229 Nexus7 no questions asked to BestBuy. I'd much rather pay a $100 more for the upcoming iPad Mini which should have a retina display and beefed up internals. If the outgoing iPad Mini was essentially a minimized iPad2, then I'm expecting the upcoming iPad Mini to be essentially a minimized iPad3.. with the upgraded lightning connector. Combine the screen/internal/connector upgrades, the abundant Apple App store and an ecosystem that I'm already heavily invested in.. and its well worth the $100 increase in my opinion. I almost forgot about the ability to use Airplay to stream anything from the iPad Mini to any of my various AppleTVs.. and iOS7.
Seems the new Nexus 7 got great reviews for mainly one reason: the retina like display.
That much is obvious. But a 9/10 on The Verge for a 2013 tablet computer that gets 6 hours battery life with Wifi On and not even gaming!!? The Verge should be ashamed of themselves. If Apple's mini 2 with Retina display got 6 hours battery life I'd personally consider it a dud.
Google testing battery life with Wifi Off and display brightness at 40% to push the battery to 9 hours? The whole thing is like watching The Truman Show.
How is this article biased? All AI did was to present events as they happened. Did you even read it???
IMHO the Verge got paid by Google to write an overly positive review and then retracted it about a year later. This is common practice in the world of yellow press...
You know what's worse than getting paid to give a 2013 6 hour battery life tablet a 9/10 review on The Verge. Not being paid to do it. That's the saddest part if all this. They think battery life is just a bullet point. I would have given 6 battery life a 2/10; that would bring the average down. Because 6 hour battery life is a 2/10 for battery life in my book. If it got 8 hours I'd still be annoyed if I bought one. 6 is abysmal. It's dud territory. The iPad mini was getting 15+ hours in some reviews.
That much is obvious. But a 9/10 on The Verge for a 2013 tablet computer that gets 6 hours battery life with Wifi On and not even gaming!!? The Verge should be ashamed of themselves. If Apple's mini 2 with Retina display got 6 hours battery life I'd personally consider it a dud.
Google testing battery life with Wifi Off and display brightness at 40% to push the battery to 9 hours? The whole thing is like watching The Truman Show.
There's not a lot of "real life" battery test results yet, not unusual since it's brand new. Adam Savage and partner have a pretty good one over on their site and it doesn't come up with that same 6 hr battery life conclusion you're posting. http://www.tested.com/tech/457058-testing-new-nexus-7s-battery-life/
Retina mini will eat out the share of iPad.
They better bring in iPad a yet higher resolution display and retina to mini. <img alt="1smoking.gif" id="user_yui_3_10_0_1_1376483203790_1446" src="http://forums-files.appleinsider.com/images/smilies/1smoking.gif" style="line-height:1.231;" name="user_yui_3_10_0_1_1376483203790_1446">
Apple will release a Retina mini and a smaller thinner iPad 5 in the same res as the iPad 4 and I'll choose the iPad 5 every time. I prefer a 10" tablet. Yes, the mini Retina will take sales away from the iPad 5, but that's Apple taking it away from themselves. That's the best way to do it.
There's not a lot of "real life" battery test results yet, not unusual since it's brand new. Adam Savage and partner have a pretty good one over on their site and it doesn't come up with that same 6 hr battery life conclusion you're posting. http://www.tested.com/tech/457058-testing-new-nexus-7s-battery-life/
Why bother? There is already 9 hours Google claimed. And like someone said there's even 100 hours battery life for Nexus 7 if you just stand-bying it.
There's not a lot of "real life" battery test results yet, not unusual since it's brand new. Adam Savage and partner have a pretty good one over on their site and it doesn't come up with that same 6 hr battery life conclusion you're posting.
They tested with Bluetooth and NFC turned off though, which besides being just weird, probably doesn't actually replicate normal use.
I know some techie will argue back that a Google tablet user is "smart enough to know" to turn those things off when they are just watching a movie, and "empowered to do so" by the eminent configurability of the amazing Android OS, but the average user of a Nexus is just as likely to be a 60 year old man who knows nothing about technology.
People don't generally futz around turning on and off the internal radios on their devices. Bluetooth and NFC should certainly have been left on for the test.
Why bother? There is already 9 hours Google claimed. And like someone said there's even 100 hours battery life for Nexus 7 if you just stand-bying it.
True enough. Add to that the WSJ writer claiming only 6 real hours and no other tests should be done. Enough proof for anyone right there and anyone claiming more than 6 hours is probably not truthful.
They tested with Bluetooth and NFC turned off though, which besides being just weird, probably doesn't actually replicate normal use.
I know some techie will argue back that a Google tablet user is "smart enough to know" to turn those things off when they are just watching a movie, and "empowered to do so" by the eminent configurability of the amazing Android OS, but the average user of a Nexus is just as likely to be a 60 year old man who knows nothing about technology.
People don't generally futz around turning on and off the internal radios on their devices. Bluetooth and NFC should certainly have been left on for the test.
Walt Mossberg called battery life of new Nexus 7 something I can't quite remember. Atrocious? Pathetic? Something along these lines. That say it all.
They tested with Bluetooth and NFC turned off though, which besides being just weird, probably doesn't actually replicate normal use.
I don't know how much Bluetooth would impact battery life, but since one of the knocks against NFC is that hardly anyone uses it, why would simulating normal use require NFC to be turned on?
But mostly because the Verge's scoring system is to rate the tablets, then add 4 to the score if it's an Android tablet and subtract 1 if it's an iOS tablet. The Verge has NEVER been a reasonable source for unbiased reviews.
See?
I don't trust reviews. The reviewer rarely spends enough time with a device to make a bonafide review. It's usually no more than a expanded initial review.
That made my morning. The hardware story doesn't exactly fit, but the Amiga users were the exact same kind of rabidpompus weenies that today, drones on and on about Android. I think Amiga users must have been the very first group that the term "fanboy" could rightly be applied to.
The difference being that Android has been the underdog technologywise in both hardware and software the entire time (iOS and Apple being the leader). Amiga technology was so far ahead of it's time it was not even funny. At least 10 years. PC compatibles at the time I was buying my first Amiga had DOS, CGA-Graphics and sound that would make dogs cry. Apple had the GUI nailed down but was not even color and with only cooperative multitasking. Not to mention extremely expensive. Amiga tech had many times the multimedia capacity at a fifth of the price at the time. I was *definately* an Amiga fanboy (I still am and always will be) but being a "rabid pompus weenie" at the time was actually somewhat grounded in reality compare to todays Android fanboys. They only love the idea of getting *something* for *nothing* (or cheap). And that something does not even have to be that good. They can live with "good enough" as long as they have not payed what they consider to be "too much". A Steve Jobs quote on Microsoft seems appropriate here: "-They just have no taste".
I used my Amigas excusively for my personal computing needs until the Autumn of 1998 when I bought my first Windows PC. Only at that point (with NVIdia TnT2 Graphics, 16-bit Soundblaster Sound, Windows 95 and an (extremely overclockable) Celeron 300A) did I feel that the value-for-money equation tilted towards the Wintel World. My expanded 25MHz Amiga 3000 still chugs along pretty decently for being over 20 years old. Try running an old 25MHz PC-Compatible with whatever version of Windows that came at the time and you will probably think you are watching a slideshow.
It's an absolute tradegy for all of computing that the Amiga people never got the chance to continue developing what they had into something truly wonderful.
I feel sad every time I think about it.
PS. At the time when Apples top of the line model was the Quadra 840AV, the fastest Mac you could buy was an expanded Amiga 4000 with a MacOS Software emulator running on it. It even multitasked and you could run whatever Amiga software you wanted to run in the background. And of course, it was like half the price of the Qaudra at the time...
You know what's worse than getting paid to give a 2013 6 hour battery life tablet a 9/10 review on The Verge. Not being paid to do it. That's the saddest part if all this.
This article, like others, is so bias and lacks fair journalism. I own the new Nexus 7 and its fantastic. None of these issues have appeared. It out performs the mini and looks much better. Please try to be fair and not just report what makes Apple look good.
Comments
Bing antenna-gate and consumer reports.
I gotta say I fell for the hype.
I bought the Nexus7 based on the specs, that it ran the very latest version of Android, that Android is "open" and the cheap $229 price. That said the experience wasn't exactly what I thought it would be. The biggest concern being the Google Play app store. While the most popular apps (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc) were available.. many of the 2nd and 3rd tier apps I'd gotten used to on the iPhone & iPad, simply weren't available for Android tablets. Which meant for tasks like checking XBL I went back to using my iPhone.
I didn't have any issues with GPS, and found Google navigation to work wonderfully. But did immediately notice the jittery scrolling and buggy multitouch. There is a buttery smoothness to navigating ALL Apple devices, and it just isn't there with Android. It doesnt matter how much processor power & ram they pump into.. the OS simply is not as refined. Windows has the same problem. Its something you really do not notice until you go from using an Apple product to an Android/Windows product. A good example would be the trackpad on laptops. Once you use one on a Macbook running OSX.. using anything else (including the same Macbook running Windows) makes the trackpad seem like its fighting you to move around. Like there is too much friction.
The exact same friction thing happened with the Nexus7, almost as if theres an initial millisecond delay before the device recognizes your movement. One of my friends best explained as "dead zone". Apple products have zero dead zone. They recognize the smallest of movements and can be navigated with exact inputs. Android/Windows seems to have a few milliseconds of deadzone before the recognize the same small incremental movements.
Anyways.. with the AllThingsD announcement of a Sept 10th Apple "event" I went ahead and returned my $229 Nexus7 no questions asked to BestBuy. I'd much rather pay a $100 more for the upcoming iPad Mini which should have a retina display and beefed up internals. If the outgoing iPad Mini was essentially a minimized iPad2, then I'm expecting the upcoming iPad Mini to be essentially a minimized iPad3.. with the upgraded lightning connector. Combine the screen/internal/connector upgrades, the abundant Apple App store and an ecosystem that I'm already heavily invested in.. and its well worth the $100 increase in my opinion. I almost forgot about the ability to use Airplay to stream anything from the iPad Mini to any of my various AppleTVs.. and iOS7.
Cant wait for 9/10!
Bias much? ;-)
That much is obvious. But a 9/10 on The Verge for a 2013 tablet computer that gets 6 hours battery life with Wifi On and not even gaming!!? The Verge should be ashamed of themselves. If Apple's mini 2 with Retina display got 6 hours battery life I'd personally consider it a dud.
Google testing battery life with Wifi Off and display brightness at 40% to push the battery to 9 hours? The whole thing is like watching The Truman Show.
You know what's worse than getting paid to give a 2013 6 hour battery life tablet a 9/10 review on The Verge. Not being paid to do it. That's the saddest part if all this. They think battery life is just a bullet point. I would have given 6 battery life a 2/10; that would bring the average down. Because 6 hour battery life is a 2/10 for battery life in my book. If it got 8 hours I'd still be annoyed if I bought one. 6 is abysmal. It's dud territory. The iPad mini was getting 15+ hours in some reviews.
Originally Posted by pmz
2. Apple introduces iPad mini...which is every bit an iPad...
Except the usable screen size.
There's not a lot of "real life" battery test results yet, not unusual since it's brand new. Adam Savage and partner have a pretty good one over on their site and it doesn't come up with that same 6 hr battery life conclusion you're posting.
http://www.tested.com/tech/457058-testing-new-nexus-7s-battery-life/
Apple will release a Retina mini and a smaller thinner iPad 5 in the same res as the iPad 4 and I'll choose the iPad 5 every time. I prefer a 10" tablet. Yes, the mini Retina will take sales away from the iPad 5, but that's Apple taking it away from themselves. That's the best way to do it.
Why bother? There is already 9 hours Google claimed. And like someone said there's even 100 hours battery life for Nexus 7 if you just stand-bying it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gatorguy
There's not a lot of "real life" battery test results yet, not unusual since it's brand new. Adam Savage and partner have a pretty good one over on their site and it doesn't come up with that same 6 hr battery life conclusion you're posting.
http://www.tested.com/tech/457058-testing-new-nexus-7s-battery-life/
They tested with Bluetooth and NFC turned off though, which besides being just weird, probably doesn't actually replicate normal use.
I know some techie will argue back that a Google tablet user is "smart enough to know" to turn those things off when they are just watching a movie, and "empowered to do so" by the eminent configurability of the amazing Android OS, but the average user of a Nexus is just as likely to be a 60 year old man who knows nothing about technology.
People don't generally futz around turning on and off the internal radios on their devices. Bluetooth and NFC should certainly have been left on for the test.
True enough. Add to that the WSJ writer claiming only 6 real hours and no other tests should be done. Enough proof for anyone right there and anyone claiming more than 6 hours is probably not truthful.
Walt Mossberg called battery life of new Nexus 7 something I can't quite remember. Atrocious? Pathetic? Something along these lines. That say it all.
EDIT: "Lousy". Now I remember.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gazoobee
They tested with Bluetooth and NFC turned off though, which besides being just weird, probably doesn't actually replicate normal use.
I don't know how much Bluetooth would impact battery life, but since one of the knocks against NFC is that hardly anyone uses it, why would simulating normal use require NFC to be turned on?
I don't trust reviews. The reviewer rarely spends enough time with a device to make a bonafide review. It's usually no more than a expanded initial review.
Why complain?
Sure. With dimmer brightness. Like I said, 100 hrs. If you just turn the damn thing off. Ha. Ha.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gazoobee
"Amiga Syndrome" hehe.
That made my morning. The hardware story doesn't exactly fit, but the Amiga users were the exact same kind of rabid pompus weenies that today, drones on and on about Android. I think Amiga users must have been the very first group that the term "fanboy" could rightly be applied to.
The difference being that Android has been the underdog technologywise in both hardware and software the entire time (iOS and Apple being the leader). Amiga technology was so far ahead of it's time it was not even funny. At least 10 years. PC compatibles at the time I was buying my first Amiga had DOS, CGA-Graphics and sound that would make dogs cry. Apple had the GUI nailed down but was not even color and with only cooperative multitasking. Not to mention extremely expensive. Amiga tech had many times the multimedia capacity at a fifth of the price at the time. I was *definately* an Amiga fanboy (I still am and always will be) but being a "rabid pompus weenie" at the time was actually somewhat grounded in reality compare to todays Android fanboys. They only love the idea of getting *something* for *nothing* (or cheap). And that something does not even have to be that good. They can live with "good enough" as long as they have not payed what they consider to be "too much". A Steve Jobs quote on Microsoft seems appropriate here: "-They just have no taste".
I used my Amigas excusively for my personal computing needs until the Autumn of 1998 when I bought my first Windows PC. Only at that point (with NVIdia TnT2 Graphics, 16-bit Soundblaster Sound, Windows 95 and an (extremely overclockable) Celeron 300A) did I feel that the value-for-money equation tilted towards the Wintel World. My expanded 25MHz Amiga 3000 still chugs along pretty decently for being over 20 years old. Try running an old 25MHz PC-Compatible with whatever version of Windows that came at the time and you will probably think you are watching a slideshow.
It's an absolute tradegy for all of computing that the Amiga people never got the chance to continue developing what they had into something truly wonderful.
I feel sad every time I think about it.
PS. At the time when Apples top of the line model was the Quadra 840AV, the fastest Mac you could buy was an expanded Amiga 4000 with a MacOS Software emulator running on it. It even multitasked and you could run whatever Amiga software you wanted to run in the background. And of course, it was like half the price of the Qaudra at the time...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ireland
You know what's worse than getting paid to give a 2013 6 hour battery life tablet a 9/10 review on The Verge. Not being paid to do it. That's the saddest part if all this.
Agreed!