Nexus 2013 7 inch tablet

I was so happy with the fact that Google allowed me to send back my original Nexus 7 inch tablet for credit when for the third time it became a brick. I had to applaud them for standing by their customer, me, and making the purchase of this product right. I must say that the new tablet is much faster, has a camera on the back which I use a lot for things around the office and doing site surveys at customer sites and I have not run into any memory limitations as of yet but I am very picky about what I put onto it. I would have like the option of an SD card slot where I could add additional memory if I wanted but it is not a deal breaker for me obviously. If you make judicious use of the available cloud storage you should be fine. I have thrown all my music up to the Amazon cloud and I am able to access that from any device that use including my phone (Samsung Note II), ASUS TF300T, iPad 1 & 2, and any computer I lay my hands on.

Another surprise I had with the new design is how loud the stereo speakers are on this unit. It makes it nice to set it beside me to listen to audio books while I am working on different things in the house. I also purchased a nice simple case that has a magnet built into the front flap that acts just like the iPad magnetic cover does to turn on and off the unit. This is a quick way for me to turn of the screen display while a sound application is running that helps to cut down battery drain on the unit. When I open the cover it immediately turns on at the sign in screen to prevent unauthorized access.

This has become my go to tablet now for most everything I do. It is small enough to fit in my pocket, fit on the shelf in my car and have a large enough screen to allow me to see a movie, read a book or do some simple notes on a project. With the mail and calendar programs I use it makes it very easy to continue to communicate with the outside world and whenever I need an instant hotspot I can fire up my Verizon hotspot real quick to acquire that capability for any of the devices that I carry. I have no longer included 4G as an option to any of my device except my phone because you normally don’t need it except for short exceptions. It is much simpler to have just one plan for this purpose that I have to manage and take care of all of the machines I own.

This would probably be a good time to go over the list of apps that I use on my tablets. I choose most of them by whether they will do the job for me but I refine that to include those apps that are available on both Android as well as iOS and if possible have a browser or desktop application as well.

For the Office I use: Evernote, OneNote, OnLive Desktop, Dropbox, SkyDrive, Pocket, RingCentral, Keep, Fill and Sign PDF Forms, Lync 2013, Feedly, Adobe Reader, LogMeIn, Instapaper, Outlook Web App, Messaging,  and Skype.

For Personal and Entertainment: Amazon Kindle, Amazon MP3, Audible, BeyondPod, Cozi, Hulu Plus, Pepperplate, Roku, Scrabble, SmugMugMobile, SquareSpace, Xfinity TV, NetFlix, WatchESPN, Plex.

I’ll go into more detail on how I use some of these programs in another posting. I hope this gives you some insight on using a tablet and maybe some detail on the Nexus 7 if this is one of those tablets that you are thinking or purchasing.Let me know how you are using your tablets for work and play, I would really like to know.