Google Nexus 10 review

With the launch of the Nexus 4 and Nexus 10, Google's flagship Android brand is fully equipped for the consumer battle — but still not enterprise-friendly. It may have arrived the week after the iPad 4, Apple's most advanced iPad, and buck the trend for smaller devices, but the Nexus 10 Google/Samsung co-production is already getting more attention. The Android tablet has more memory, higher resolution and a 16:9 aspect ratio in its favour, and with the latest 4.2 version of the OS on-board it has every claim to be as usable as Apple's device.

One main design cue that differentiates the Nexus 10 from the competition is the relatively large radius of its rounded corners, which together with the wide 2cm bezel gives the tablet a faint hint of a 1950s Bakelite television. Unlike those, however, the tablet is light enough to hold in one hand for extended periods, due to its use of plastic throughout the casework, while the back has a rubberised finish that secures even a light grasp.

This lack of weight makes the tablet feel slightly cheap and insubstantial on first contact, an impression amplified by the emphatic haptic buzz that accompanies use of the virtual keyboard. That gives a curiously hollow feel to the device for a few minutes, until one is sucked in to the sheer quality of how it actually behaves.

It will be a rare animal who isn't seduced by the combination of the stupidly high-quality screen (2560 by 1600 pixels, 300ppi), the lucidity of the Jelly Bean interface, and the fluidity of its actions. It's taken a while for Android devices to get the raw graphics firepower and enough iterations of the interface code to make the UI vanish during use, but it's got there now. Experienced Android users will soon learn the few changes in 4.2 — basically, a reassignment of how the setup and status areas are presented in the swipe-down bar at the top — and lose themselves in the familiarity of the rest. New users will appreciate how the commonest tasks in configuring the tablet and responding to events are presented in a logical and easily discovered hierarchy.


This lack of weight makes the tablet feel slightly cheap and insubstantial on first contact, an impression amplified by the emphatic haptic buzz that accompanies use of the virtual keyboard. That gives a curiously hollow feel to the device for a few minutes, until one is sucked in to the sheer quality of how it actually behaves.

It will be a rare animal who isn't seduced by the combination of the stupidly high-quality screen (2560 by 1600 pixels, 300ppi), the lucidity of the Jelly Bean interface, and the fluidity of its actions. It's taken a while for Android devices to get the raw graphics firepower and enough iterations of the interface code to make the UI vanish during use, but it's got there now. Experienced Android users will soon learn the few changes in 4.2 — basically, a reassignment of how the setup and status areas are presented in the swipe-down bar at the top — and lose themselves in the familiarity of the rest. New users will appreciate how the commonest tasks in configuring the tablet and responding to events are presented in a logical and easily discovered hierarchy.
nexus-10-settingsAndroid 4.2 provides convenient new access to common configuration settings.

It's the mark of a mature and well-designed interface that it gets out of the way as much as possible, but no further. In 4.2, and especially in the Nexus 10, Google is approaching this balance. Once a few functions are learned — how to pull up the gallery of running apps and tap to switch, how to pin apps to the desktop — there's little in the way of configuring the tablet to work as you wish.

Again, the screen is the star. With its cinematic 16:9 aspect ratio and 10-inch diagonal size, there's more room to set things up than on the (4:3, 9.7in.) iPad, That fat bezel vanishes from perception and the device is hard to put down. Whether you're flicking through photo galleries or rummaging through the Google Play app store, browsing around the web or binging in YouTube, the combination of the Nexus 10's lightness (603g), its eye-filling display area and the simplicity of switching between tasks make it a compelling toy.

The Nexus 10 deserves its place as the premier native Google tablet. In almost every respect it equals or outperforms the latest iPad 4, with Android 4.2 a worthy contender against iOS 6 — and substantially superior in the case of Google Maps, following Apple's self-inflicted mapping catastrophe. All this at a much lower price, reflecting Google's focus on advertising revenue over hardware margins. As with the other recent Nexus devices, it sets the standard for other manufacturers. If Google can persuade developers to fill in the gaps in the app market — and heavy sales are the only thing that will do that — then the Nexus 10 will deserve to be wildly popular.