Summary: The Nexus 10 sets the standard
for other tablet manufacturers. If Google can persuade developers to
fill in the gaps in the app market, then it will deserve to be wildly
popular.
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.
The Wi-Fi-only Nexus 10 comes in 16GB and 32GB models and costs
US$399, UK£319 or AU$469 for the former and US$499, UK£389 or AU$569 for
the latter. We reviewed the 32GB model.
Design :
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.
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 committed Google user will get the best from all this. New
Android devices, when presented with an existing Google account on
setup, soak up the existing media and app choices from the cloud with
little effort. Five minutes after configuring the Nexus 10, most of our
account's apps were installed and the Google suite of email, talk,
Google+ and so on were populated and active.
There are still some rough edges. Google security has various sorts
of password, especially if you've set up two-factor authentication, and
it's not always obvious whether you need to enter a one-shot device/app
password or the main account password — a problem tacitly admitted by
the way the interface gently chides you for using the wrong sort at the
wrong time. This minor frustration is offset by the fact that you have
the option of two-factor authentication in the first place — we've used
this since it was introduced around 18 months ago, and it's worked very
well.
Elsewhere, though, Android still lacks a head for business. IT
managers and planners considering it for corporate deployment will look
in vain for standard management tools like remote wipe or control, app
white- or blacklisting, camera disable, USB device management and so on.
Although it's possible to implement many of these features via
third-party software (or for the truly heroic, a custom build of the
OS), Google is clearly focused on the consumer market and is leaving
enterprise to fend for itself. This is a shame, as the platform is
delivering some exceptional hardware and developing into an ecosystem
with considerable flexibility, openness and economy. All attributes the
modern enterprise needs.
The Nexus 10 does have enterprise-class wireless networking hardware,
with dual-band 802.11n supported alongside MIMO internal antennas
(oddly, 5GHz 802 11a has dropped off the specifications — probably
because nobody has ever cared very much).
Audio is very good, for a tablet. The Nexus 10 has stereo speakers
along the shorter edges of the case that give plenty of volume and good
separation when watching videos in landscape mode. It's not until you
actually get proper stereo from a tablet that you realise how much
you've missed it — if anyone still does comparative device shopping in
the high street, this one feature may sell a substantial number of
devices.
The 5-megapixel rear camera is par for the course, and the
1.9-megapixel front-facing one is up to snuff. The new camera app in
Android 4.2 has some useful extra modes: notably, it will prompt you
through the creation of panoramas and Photo Spheres, where the screen
creates a virtual space around the tablet that you fill in by taking
pictures according to small blue dots superimposed on the scene. These
prompt you to take enough pictures to generate an almost complete
capture of the 3D space around you, creating an image that can be
displayed as an immersive recreation of the scene. It takes a little
while and can get nearby objects rather badly wrong, but does compensate
well for differing light levels. Best kept for open spaces.
Another useful innovation is a pop-up options menu that appears after
a long touch on the scene. Designed for thumb operation, this groups
together exposure, picture type, flash and setup in a circle around the
touched point. Although the icons and text that appear can be hard to
read if they clash with bright parts of the picture, a twitch of the
digit soon moves them somewhere better.
Other improvements in 4.2 include a gesture-driven keyboard where you
can swipe out words. This is heavily influenced — in polite parlance —
by Swype, the major differentiator
being that the word it thinks you're skidding out follows your finger
around the keyboard. This method loses its sparkle the bigger the
keyboard gets, and in landscape mode you finds yourself making vigorous
hand actions akin to Simon Rattle giving Beethoven's Fifth a good
workout.
The Gmail interface is rather more excellent. At last, email text can
be zoomed or made to fit the screen — an improvement of gem-like
pleasure for those with less than perfect eyesight. Elsewhere, you can
put widgets on the lock screen for first time.
The one hardware option we looked at was a book-style screen cover
with a chamois-effect surface on one side and wipe-clean low-friction
plastic on the other. It's fitted by removing a strip of plastic from
the top of the tablet's rear surface and then pressing the cover hinge
into the resulting gap. Multiple tiny clips snap into matching slots
with a crackle like distant fireworks. As with the tablet itself, the
book cover's initial impression of slight flimsiness belies the design's
light but tough nature.
Performance & battery life :
The Nexus 10's dual-core 1.7GHz Samsung Exynos 5 Dual CPU, quad-core Mali-T604 GPU and 2GB of RAM propel it to the forefront of tablet performance — at least insofar as we've been able to test it in the short time we've had with the device. It beats the (1GHz, dual-core Apple A5X) iPad 3 and the (1.3GHz, quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3) Nexus 7 on a pair of browser benchmarks, albeit not by very much:
However, the broader-based Geekbench test, which measures processor
(integer and floating point) and memory performance, showed the Nexus 10
far outstripping the iPad 3 and the Nexus 7:
Unfortunately we didn't have a brand-new iPad 4, with its upgraded
Apple A6X processor, but Geekbench results we've seen elsewhere suggest
that the Nexus 10 has the beating of that too. One stand-out
performance win for the Nexus 10 is in floating-point CPU figures, where
it's four times faster than the iPad 3 (and, we expect, roughly 1.6
times the iPad 4). This is due to two Cortex-A15 VFP floating point
units, one per core, that provides full hardware support for such
mathematics. The practical advantages of this will include faster
physics engines in games, quicker scaling and image manipulation, more
efficient signal processing (in, for example, virtual synthesisers and
audio manipulation), and other maths-intensive tasks.
Google claims around 7 hours of web browsing and 9 hours of video
watching for the Nexus 10, which given that it probably has around a
45Wh battery — Google only specifies the current capacity of 9000mAh
(9Ah), but it's going to be a single cell Li-polymer — means that it
takes around 7 watts. Given the maximum you can take from an ordinary
USB port is 2.5W, some care is needed to manage power usage if you're
away from a proper charger for any length of time. We didn't have time
to run a full battery discharge test, but will update this review later
with actual data.
The Nexus 10's major weakness is the lack of Android
tablet-specific apps (and, to a lesser extent, Android 4.2 compatible
apps — at the time of writing, BBC Media Player was among the list of
casualties). Apple claims over a quarter of a million iPad apps, but
Google doesn't break out such figures from Play. There's a very great
deal of Android-specific software, of course, and much of it works well
enough on tablets. However, a lot doesn't, with tiny, unresizable fonts
and grotesquely distorted layouts making them hard to love — or, indeed,
use. However, with the Nexus 7 selling around a million units a month
and reference devices like the Nexus 10 coming on-stream, there's a good
chance that the momentum of existing smartphone apps will see the
tablet format across this particular divide.
Conculsion :
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.
