Nexus 7, 10 or something else

tiernsee

Any advice would be very welcome. Son has saved up his Christmas money and wants to get a tablet with it. He is currently considering either the Google Nexus 7 (2013) or the Nexus 10. I'm slightly concerned as neither appears to have any additional memory slot but he says 32Gb will be ample. He plays a lot of games so I have my doubts.....

Out of the two of them which would you consider would be the better option and are there any alternatives around the same price that you would recommend? He was particularly taken with the speed and screen of the 10.


It is a big purchase for him and he is trying to get as much advice as possible to make the best decision so any guidance, experience, warnings or advice that can be shared would be most welcome.


Thanks

JasX

For the price the nexus tablets are very good performance wise (google seeming to have bet heavily on generating revenue via the android 'play' store rather from selling hardware hence with Samsung tablets etc you will pay noticeably more for similar performance)

I have an ipad, a fair few games on it and have barely used 16 of the 64GB non-expandable memory it has. With hindsight 32gb would have been perfectly adequate for me but 16 would have been rather tight. I have few movies/music files on my tablet so he will need to be slightly mindful of how he manages those but again 32gb should be fine for him

I own a nexus 4 phone

I've encouraged both a work colleague and my father to get nexus 7 tablets and having set my day's up myself it's and impressive device and both are very happy with them.

There are plenty of free 'cloud' services like Dropbox, Evernote and google drive you can use for storage space

I'm not familiar with the nexus 10 but assuming it's along the lines of the nexus 4 and 7 you'll not go far wrong.

I think it more comes down to your son's preference between the portability of the 7 (and perhaps slightly longer battery life due t the smaller screen) vs how much he prefers gaming on a larger screen and the extra cost of the nexus 10.

One final pointer I'll give on the nexus series, the difference you'll notice with android vs apple is with apple everything comes ready set-up out of the box and is locked down. Hence minimal faff getting everything up and running but if you don't like how it comes tough. On android it's pretty much a blank sheet of paper and you may find you need to go hunting for apps (which will be free) to get the basic stuff Initially setup. However there will be a full range of apps that all do things slightly differently so you will eventually be able to tweak it to operate exactly the way you want it to.

JasX

Oh one final point, some games do for perverse reasons only get released on ios (ie only on apple). Hopefully this will continue to move towards everything releasing both on android and apple but if there is a specific one he is after check it's not apple only

(Tho that's not necessarily any reason to go spend 2-3 times as much on an apple tablet)

JJ_Egan

Boils down really to do you need want the expandable storage .
Alternative is supposed to be the cloud but that requires WiFi or 3G .
Crucial for me was the expandable memory on a non 3g as WiFi is not always available out and about .

Playing games not a clue and it might be worth checking out views on gaming sites .

zenmaster

Buy one of these and download this from the App store then you can plug in a flash drive.

bod1467

I can confirm that Nexus Media Importer with an OTG cable works on a 2012 Nexus 7.

DCFC79

bod1467 wrote: »

I can confirm that Nexus Media Importer with an OTG cable works on a 2012 Nexus 7.

I also can confirm this.

You can also sign up for a cloud based storage system eg drop box but of course only worth signing up for if there will be access to wifi where ever he goes.

eamon

I have a Nexus 7 and the 32gb memory is fine. You can always use a PC or laptop as a repository.

bod1467

The other thing about the Nexus (from a music perspective) is that Google Play Music allows you to store up to 20k songs online, and these appear in the Google Music app when you have a network connection.

So you could have a reduced music collection whilst out and about, and a much more comprehensive one when connected to wifi. (Internet connection speed and bandwidth usage need to be considered when streaming over wifi). My wife does this with her Nexus 7 (2012).