News - Next-gen Google Nexus 7 tablet spotted online

[HEXUS]

New tablet runs Android 4.3 on quad-core Snapdragon SoC paired with 2GB of RAM.

Read more.

[cjs150]

If specs are right then looks very interesting. My problem with this remains the lack of storage. The idea that everything will be in cloud is fatally flawed. Not everywhere has wifi, most areas are not free wifi and I have over 1,5TB of movies (lossless Blu-ray) most cloud services are too expensive

[Arus]

'rounded black rectangle'
Uh-oh. Incoming Apple lawsuit!

[Funkstar]

If specs are right then looks very interesting. My problem with this remains the lack of storage. The idea that everything will be in cloud is fatally flawed. Not everywhere has wifi, most areas are not free wifi and I have over 1,5TB of movies (lossless Blu-ray) most cloud services are too expensive

Even with 128GB on board (the only tablet with that amount is the eye wateringly expensive iPad) you will only get four films on there without some additional compression on your rips. I understand why you would archive it as direct rips, but it is kind of a waste to not ave a re-compressed version as well.

[Dooms]

If they do the same thing of other generations and release at a 'cheap' price I'll snap one up to replace my very ageing TF101

[aidanjt]

Is it 1990 or something? Why is it when there's leaked photos these days, they're still grainy pixellated crapollas? You can put a better digital camera in a postage stamp these days.

[Dooms]

Is it 1990 or something? Why is it when there's leaked photos these days, they're still grainy pixellated crapollas? You can put a better digital camera in a postage stamp these days.

Always wondered that about the UFO sighting photos

[cptwhite_uk]

That picture could be anything ffs...it's a blurry black rectangle with rounded corners, seriously?

[CampGareth]

The picture, as bad as it is, seems to suggest there'll be a notification LED and a front facing camera. A nexus 7 device has been shown in adverts for google hangouts iirc with a notification LED in that spot so here's hoping.

[cjs150]

Funkstar: the last thing I want to do is to have to transcode to another format. It just takes too much time.

High quality lossless Blu-ray rip (of my legally owned Blu rays!)works out at roughly 15GB per movie. Going on holiday I would want 15-20 blu-rays and maybe 50 TV episodes (say 1-1.3 G per 45 mins) and some music. 500Gb storage would do it!

That is not extreme. Largest SD card is currently 256Gb (eyewatering price though) so a 512 Gb SD card cannot be far off.

I believe the official specs for SD cards currently top out at 2Gb capacity so there is the ability to create a tablet with loads of storage capability

[CampGareth]

Funkstar: the last thing I want to do is to have to transcode to another format. It just takes too much time.

High quality lossless Blu-ray rip (of my legally owned Blu rays!)works out at roughly 15GB per movie. Going on holiday I would want 15-20 blu-rays and maybe 50 TV episodes (say 1-1.3 G per 45 mins) and some music. 500Gb storage would do it!

I'm afraid yours is a niche market, and because it's less likely that folk want huge amounts of storage with an extra 100g weight and 12.5mm thickness (i.e. a HDD) than a slim, light device you're gonna have to look at other solutions like those wifi hotspot HDD caddies. It's either make a tablet that practically no-one would buy (hey Archos, didn't you try HDDs in tablets?) or upset some customers.

That said, I do sympathise a little as my library is pretty big too, but I have wifi and unlimited 3G practically wherever I go so am fine with streaming music from home or google music and movies from a server in france.

[Dooms]

Plex at home = steaming when and where I want as long as there is Wifi / 3G.

However when I know I will be without connection for a reason (Train / Plane journey) I can just throw a TV series or a couple movies onto the device as 'backup' and swap them out every so often. Thats how I get around things.

Airports these days generally have free wifi so I can plex/netflix and anything that doesn't involve a plane will never have me away from a wifi point for more than a couple movies time

[cjs150]

CampGareth: the point is that substantial storage does not need to be in HDD form. Really, really high capacity SD cards are available (but the price is eye watering), it cannot be long before the first 1TB SD card is in the shops. That weighs very little.

Alternatives the new samsung M2 PCI based SSD format looks a possibility - very easy to scale to 1TB, but I suspect has both a weight and battery life issue.

The real question is why do tablet manufacturers mostly not include a SD card slot - could it because they want us to spend more money on the larger capacity tablets? I particularly enjoyed an answer from Nexus - it is because customers do not want to be bother with the techy stuff - or to put it another way Nexus: we only sell to stupid people

[Funkstar]

cjs150, if you really want an SD slot, there are many, many tablets that will fit the bill. And instead of going to bleeding edge capacity cards, go for one of two stops down and you will have far better £/GB. 64GB microSD cards are pretty affordable, so a few of them should do you. There are far so many tablets with microSC slots it isn't really worth listing them.

[imshimaru]

scary to think this is as powerful as the laptop I was using at work just 5 years ago...

[CampGareth]

CampGareth: the point is that substantial storage does not need to be in HDD form. Really, really high capacity SD cards are available (but the price is eye watering), it cannot be long before the first 1TB SD card is in the shops. That weighs very little.

Alternatives the new samsung M2 PCI based SSD format looks a possibility - very easy to scale to 1TB, but I suspect has both a weight and battery life issue.

The real question is why do tablet manufacturers mostly not include a SD card slot - could it because they want us to spend more money on the larger capacity tablets? I particularly enjoyed an answer from Nexus - it is because customers do not want to be bother with the techy stuff - or to put it another way Nexus: we only sell to stupid people

Point one, assuming 50p per GB holds true for the moment, yes it really does, this £200 (guesstimate) tablet would cost £700 with 1TB of flash storage. I don't know about you but I'm definitely not comfortable with that, rather have a slower, thicker device with a HDD (or more realistically find a solution that doesn't require huge amounts of on-device storage). HDDs are just so darned cheap and it's not as if media will benefit from an SSD's speed.

As for SD cards, yes you're right, it'd be nice if they were included, but surely a better long term solution is to move more things to the internet and increase availability? We as computer users went through stages, we had the giant mainframes with dumb machines tapping into their power, then we moved to individual machines with a lot of power, and now we're moving back to powerful servers/weak clients with things like facebook and general web technologies, which hands down beats the "super computers everywhere!" approach for price, flexibility and pretty much everything else. Bring me an unlimited internet connection wherever I go for *that* is the future, not huge cheap storage which is in itself based off 50 year old tech!

Back on a relevant note, if you really really want an SD card, can't make do with wifi hotspot HDDs, and so on you're gonna have to make tradeoffs, and the tradeoff this time is using cyanogenmod with something like a samsung tablet. Google officially wants you to find a solution that isn't huge storage amounts because it's the right thing to do to push technology forward.

*edit* /drunk