Well, Google’s Nexus 7 has at last managed to land in India. ASUS India has confirmed that the tablet has been priced at Rs 19,990 and will be available through Chroma, a Tata group electronics retailer, and other large format retailers. Nexus 7 has already become a hot seller and is the most sold Android tablet in the world within just three months of its launch. The tale is a little twisted in this part of the world. Nexus 7 became a hot seller, simply because of a low price point and a high spec sheet. There are hardly any alternatives to the Nexus 7 in the global market to offer a quad core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor at just $199. A powerful processor at a low price is simply ‘wow’ globally but when it comes to India, we would anyday prefer a device that delivers more in real time than what it’s actually made for.
For instance, majority of us would have expected the Nexus 7 to house at least a 2 mega pixel rear camera along with USB OTG for connecting pen drives, a standard external memory card slot of 32 GB capacity, but unfortunately, Google’s Nexus 7 is totally out of the box! Of course, Indian tablet buyers are excited about the Nexus 7 but most of them end up with one question: “What to do with it?” From a consumer point of view, this reaction is totally justified as we are used to economical tablets from home grown brands as well as big guns like Samsung, Huawei, Sony, HCL etc offering a much usable spec sheet than the Nexus 7. So, here’s a quick look at the cons of the Nexus 7 as seen from the eyes of an Indian buyer:
No external memory card slot: Only the 8 GB and 16 GB version of Google’s Nexus 7 is available in India as of now. So, if you buy the 8 GB version, you will get around 5 GB of storage space and around 12 GB in the 16 GB version.
Nexus 7 cannot read your pen drive: There is no USB OTG support on the Nexus 7, so, you cannot plug in your pen drive to watch movies.
No rear camera: The Nexus 7 houses a 1.2 megapixel front camera only.
So, if you had to step out of the Nexus 7 aura by now, then here are a few quality alternatives to the Nexus 7, but again, Google-ASUS stand out to be the winner in terms of the display screen, processing capabilities and of course Android Jelly Bean operating system. So, if you are cool with a dual core processor and Android Ice Cream Sandwich, then you might consider the following.
Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 P3100
Price: Rs 19,300
Android v4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) OS
17.8-cm (7-inch) TFT Capacitive Touchscreen
1 GHz Dual Core Processor
3 MP Primary Camera
0.3 MP Secondary Camera
Wi-Fi Enabled
HD Recording
Expandable Storage Capacity of 32 GB
Huawei MediaPad 7 Lite Tablet
Price: Rs 13,700
3.2 MP Primary Camera
Wi-Fi Enabled
Android v4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) OS
0.3 MP Secondary Camera
17.8-cm (7-inch) LCD Capacitive Touchscreen
1.2 GHz Cortex-A8 Processor
Expandable Storage Capacity of 32 GB
HCL ME G1 Tablet
Price: Rs 14,261
Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) Operating System
24.6-cm (9.7-inch) LCD IPS Display
ARM Cortex A9 1.2 GHz Dual Core Processor
Expandable Storage Capacity of 32 GB
2 MP Primary and 0.3 MP Secondary Camera
WiFi
4G and 3G Enabled
Google Nexus 7 Asus 1B019A
Price: Rs 19,999
17.8-cm (7-inch) WXGA LED Backlight IPS panel
NVIDIA Tegra 3 T30L Quad-Core, 1.3 GHz Processor
Android v4.1 (Jelly Bean) OS
1.2 MP Front Camera