When Google finally got round to making the Nexus 7 official at Wednesday’s Keynote of the I/O conference amongst all the excitement there was a little bit of head-scratching, I’m sure as to why it was launched with such poor storage options.
The Nexus 7 is an awesome tablet no matter how you look at it, with a fantastic screen, Tegra 3 and a killer 12-core GPU it’s a pretty powerful beast and it’s hardly bad looking, either. However, what leaves a lot to be desired is the device’s storage options, for that bargain price of $199 you get 8GB of storage and for an extra 50 bucks you get the 16GB model for $249. I’m sure many that spend more time with music and movies will opt for the 16GB option however, if you were to go with the 8GB option then you’d be pretty bummed when you get it home and have a look in your settings menu.
Due to the system files that Jelly Bean takes up on the tablet what you’re left with as storage for yourself is a rather meagre 5.92GB. Which isn’t a whole lot now is it? That’s probably at most two of these HD movies that you can now purchase and a small amount of music for offline listening. It’s fair enough that many of use rely on streaming things, especially at home, like Netflix or Google Music but, with this being a WiFi only tablet once you’re offline you’re potentially left with whatever little you have on storage. What I can’t understand is why Google and ASUS didn’t throw in a microSD card slot, I have one on my A100, and I bought a 32GB card soon after I bought it, I still have oodles of space left. The simple addition of a card slot would make the tablet look far more attractive if you ask me, to buy a tablet affordably and expand when you need to is a concept we applied to Desktop PCs of old and something that I wish would be more common on tablets. I curse at HP for leaving a card slot out of the Touchpad and I question whether or not the added slot would have really cost Google and ASUS that much more to produce but, we might not ever know.
Let’s hope that Google Music makes its way outside of the US some time soon, because here in the UK, an 8GB Nexus 7 isn’t going to be playing all that much music.
[Source: Talk Android]