Photos and GPS.

Part I is here.

The still camera:

The camera in the Nexus 7 Google tablet is mediocre at best. As good – or as bad, if you prefer – as the one in the iPad Mini. If you care little for your work and are happy to confine its publication to small web images, fine. But if you want decent web art or paper prints, then forget it. Ther is no built in flash, which his probably just as well.

Still images are around 1.9MB and when emailing I cannot find any option to change size, unlike with iOS. The size is 2000 x 1500 pixels. If your subject has a broad dynamic range, you can forget the highlights, which will be burned out mostly past saving. What is needed is the HDR function provided by Apple for the excellent camera in the iPhone5.

The N7 has the same focus function as the iPhone5 – touch the area you want to focus on and the guide box moves.

Highlights burned out, excessive contrast.

If your subject has lower dynamic range, then you could squeeze out a decent 8″ x 10″ print:

Pastrami and sauerkraut on rye with a wheat beer at Alice’s Restaurant.

There’s also a well engineered panoramic mode (2000 x 394 pixels) where you hose the N7 around as shown by the arrow display on the screen, but the same excessive contrast and blown highlights, along with a healthy dose of lens flare, will prevail:

N7 panorama.

The results were so unimpressive, and cannot be saved by the N7’s neat processing controls (garbage in, garbage out) that I have not bothered to test the movie mode.

GPS:

Things look up considerably with GPS. I procured an Arkon windshield mount for $20 from Amazon and can recommend it. It holds the windshield well, and you are provided with four sets of gripping ‘feet’, two deep, two shallow. I found the tightest grip on the NZ was obtained by using the four shallow feet. These attach to the sprung plate which is opened to insert the tablet. The device is robust, well executed and cheap.

Click the image to go to Amazon.
Shown with two deep and two shallow feet fitted.

Here you can see the four shallow gripper feet with the tablet installed:

N7 installed in the Arkon car mount.

After tethering the N7 to the hotspot celluar signal from your iPhone (the N7 has GPS built in), you fire up Google Maps, tell it your start and destination, hit Start and you get excellent vocal turn-by-turn directions. I mentioned in Part I that the N7 goes to quite ridiculous levels of brightness. In a car on a sunny day with the sunroof open and sun falling on the display, you will appreciate that feature, even though you may glow at night after using it.

In the car.

I’ll debrief my son, for those of you with 11 year olds, and report on gaming performance in Part III.

Suffice it to say that the many strengths of this tablet outweigh its weaknesses, and the iPad Mini is going on sale right now. It simply cannot hold a candle to the Nexus 7 and its performance and screen quality leave a lot to be desired, especially at the ridiculous price asked. As I show in Part I, the Apple ecosystem is easily replicated in Android 4.3 on the Nexus 7.

Part III is here.