After using the Nexus 7 since December I thought I would have a quick write up of how I thought it was for my studies.
Firstly, the model I have is the 32 GB, wifi version (so no mobile internet) and for its price it is a powerful machine. Compared to some of the Android based phones I have tried it is very responsive and really has an excellent quality screen. When buying it I was comparing it to the iPad mini which is the same size though more expensive. In the end I thought the price difference was just too great and went for the Nexus, mainly because it was actually cheaper than the 16 GB iPad mini, and I knew I would need the extra space.
The primary reason for me getting a tablet is to read journal articles from. For this the screen is great. It is a nice size to both hold and to read. I was worried the screen would be too small, but with the ease at which you can zoom in and out this has never been a problem. I bought one book from the Google Play book store and it is a pleasure to read, especially with the inbuilt dictionary. This I hear is an old feature for e-readers but it is one I very much appreciated.
However, when it comes to academic reading while it is still easy to do, what the Nexus is lacking is good, annotation software. I have tried several now, the two that are worth mentioning are ezPDF Reader and Adobe Reader. I bought the ezPDF reader after checking out some reviews and it does have a lot of features that are useful. That said, it also has some severely annoying problems. The first is that it does not support the continuous scrolling of documents, it operates on the page turning system. This is fine for reading a book, but if I am annotating articles it really is a pain. I often want to got back to page, check what I just read, or maybe highlight the end line of a page and first line of the next page, erase an annotation and so on. For doing such document annotations the lack of scroll suddenly becomes very noticeable.
It also makes it extremely hard to select annotations that you have put on the page. Often the texts I read are sometimes scanned, so there is no easy option to highlight the text, you literally have to draw a straight line under what you want to emphasise. With my shaky hand this can often lead to mistakes which I want to easily remove or change. For some reason this is not easy to do with the ezPDF Reader, when you try to click on an annotation to edit it, it rarely gets selected. I ended up just going to a menu, where all the annotations are listed and selecting it from there. However, this process breaks your flow and is just too slow to be considered functional.
Instead, I found that the Adobe Reader is in fact then the best annotation software for me and it is free! It lets me continuously scroll and lets me select the annotations easily for editing. It doesn't have all the range of annotations that exPDF has but it does the basics well. I would really like something that works as well as Adobe but with more features. Something I hope will be created in the future...
I should mention that I do use a stylus when I annotating texts. I just bought one from Officeworks, nothing fancy. It works well enough, though like all capacitive screens the stylus works, at best, most of the time. After playing with a Wii U I much prefer the Wii U's resistive screen but no tablets I know of use this technology.
This brings us to the other requirement of academia, putting text into the tablet. Text entry is sloooow with the Nexus, at least for me. Even with the swipe technology it really takes a while to enter text. I am not the fastest sms texter, so it is no surprise that I am slow, but it is at a much slower pace than I had hoped for. Don't get rid of your laptop and desktops just yet. It is fine for annotations on PDFs or quick notes (Evernote is a great note taking app) but it is just that little bit too slow for note taking in a seminar or lecture.
I do have one final gripe to add, once the battery is low, plugging it into the wall does not produce enough energy to allow you to keep using it while it is charging. This means you have to stop using the tablet even if it is plugged into the wall. I have never had any device require this and I think it is a consequence of the low price. This is definitely one area the iPad mini outclasses the Nexus 7.
Overall I find using the the Nexus fun and it is great for checking email, facebook, twitter etc. It is also good for reading texts though I have yet to find the ultimate annotation software. The main advantage for me is the move from paper to electronic copies of books and journal articles. It means I have my papers with me everywhere I go (thanks to the excellent Dropbox android app). This has proven to be the biggest help as I can read something on the go, then have all the highlights on that text ready when I sit down to write. As a creation tool, however, it is not quite there yet. It really should be considered to be part of your academic technology tool box, rather than a do-it-all device.
