I’ve tested a lot of small tablets over the years, but the 2013 Nexus 7 is one of the few I genuinely wanted to love. It’s lighter, slimmer, and a clear step up from the original, and on paper it should have wiped the floor with the iPad mini and Kindle Fire HD. Instead, using it for a while left me with a nagging feeling: this could have been the excellent compact Android tablet, and Google and Asus still managed to miss a few really obvious shots.
Design: Premium Feel, Practical Annoyances
The overall hardware story is solid. The 2013 Nexus 7 comes in at 200 x 114 x 8.7mm and 290g, meaning it’s thinner and lighter than the original while feeling almost unibody. Soft-touch polycarbonate on the back and Gorilla Glass on the front give it a reassuring, dense feel in hand.
Visually, it’s classic Nexus: understated, matte, with the only real flourish being the large landscape “Nexus” logo. It looks like a serious tool, not a toy, which I still prefer over glossy, fingerprint-magnet plastic.
But then you hit the first avoidable design misstep: speaker placement. Asus added stereo speakers on the back, which should have been a clear upgrade. In landscape — you know, the orientation you actually use for movies and games — your hands sit right on top of them and muffle the sound. Forward-facing speakers weren’t some unknown tech in 2013; this was a choice.
There’s also no microSD slot. Again. On a media-friendly 7-inch tablet, that’s just bad prioritization. You’re stuck with 16GB or 32GB, and the LTE model only comes with 32GB. Sure, Google’s cloud-first strategy is obvious, but that doesn’t help when you’re on a plane or trying to sideload big video files.
Display and Audio: Stunning Screen, Half-Baked Media
The display is where the Nexus 7 (2013) absolutely crushes it. You get a 7-inch IPS panel at 1920 x 1200, which works out to 323ppi — sharper than the Retina iPad’s 264ppi and miles ahead of the 7.9-inch iPad mini’s 162ppi and the Kindle Fire HD’s 216ppi. Color reproduction, contrast, and viewing angles are all excellent.
Reading, browsing, and watching content on this thing is genuinely great. Text is razor sharp, and the IPS panel’s “ridiculously wide” viewing angles make it easy to share a screen without washing out.
Then you open a video file from USB and run straight into Android 4.3’s stock video player, which is still embarrassingly basic. It played MP4 files recorded with the tablet’s own camera, but refused to play an MP4 movie sideloaded over USB. That’s not an edge case — that’s literally how a lot of people use tablets.
Yes, the Play Store is full of better players (MX Player Pro fixed the problem in testing), but this is supposed to be Google’s reference device. Shipping a flagship tablet with a stock video player that’s “hardly usable” is lazy.
Audio is the same story. Clean output when plugged into an external amp, but volume is lower than you’d expect for a tablet, and quality takes a hit with headphones: increased stereo crosstalk, some intermodulation distortion, and a noticeable volume drop. It’s fine by smartphone standards, but tablets usually do better — and this one doesn’t.
Performance, Battery, and Software: Strong but Not Future-Proof
Under the hood, the Nexus 7 runs a Qualcomm APQ8064 Snapdragon S4 Pro with a 1.5GHz quad-core Krait CPU, Adreno 320 GPU, and 2GB of RAM. It’s not the newest chip of its era, but in benchmarks it hangs with higher-end phones and outperforms most tablets in its price range.
In real use, there wasn’t a task it couldn’t handle. Graphic-heavy titles like Real Racing 3 ran buttery smooth, and the UI stayed responsive. For everyday stuff — web, email, reading, streaming — it’s absolutely fine.
Battery is a mixed bag. The 3950mAh cell is smaller than the previous model’s but paired with more efficient internals. In testing, it handled web browsing and video playback respectably, but Google’s own stock video player was so limited we had to resort to MX Player Pro for testing. That’s not a performance problem, it’s an ecosystem one.
On the software side, Android 4.3 Jelly Bean ships with a bunch of small but meaningful tweaks. You get improved multi-user support with restricted profiles (essentially a built-in kid mode), updated stock apps, and better notifications.
There’s also support for OpenGL ES 3.0 for improved graphics, Bluetooth 4.0 LE, and hardware-based encryption for DRM, which is basically a big red carpet for HD streaming services. Google clearly saw this tablet as a media consumption hub — which makes the poor stock video experience and limited storage options even more frustrating.
Android 4.3 Experience: Smart Features, Old Problems
The UI is standard Nexus: five home screens, on-screen Back, Home, and Recent Apps keys, a Google Search bar pinned at the top, and a dock that holds six app shortcuts plus the app drawer. Nothing flashy, but efficient.
The notification shade is split in two: one side for notifications, the other for quick settings like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, auto-rotate, battery info, airplane mode, and user switching. Some toggles just dump you into full Settings instead of actually toggling — again, a small UX miss on a device that should be showcasing how Android should be done.
Multi-user support is a genuine highlight. Each user gets their own apps, settings, and files. Restricted profiles let the primary owner lock down which apps a secondary user (like a kid) can access. Storage isn’t duplicated when apps are shared across accounts; the OS just exposes them per user, which is nice.
Google Now is deeply integrated, pulling from your search history, email, and routine to serve cards for traffic, sports scores, flights, deliveries, and more. Offline voice typing works if you’ve downloaded the 20–25MB language packs, and it stays fast and accurate without a data connection.
The stock Gallery app is actually decent: multiple sorting views (Albums, Locations, Times, People, Tags), offline syncing for online albums, a capable editor with filters, frames, crop/rotate, and manual curves. But again, no dedicated video app — it all funnels through that same underpowered player.
Camera, Connectivity, and Productivity: Good Enough, Not Great
The rear 5MP camera shoots 2592 x 1944 photos and 1080p video at about 12Mbps, with mono audio. There’s no LED flash, so low-light performance is predictably poor. Image quality is okay: decent color, contrast, and sharpness, but with higher noise.
The camera UI uses a ring-based control: tap and hold to bring up a circle of options, then slide to specific settings. It’s clean and well-suited to a tablet screen, but you don’t get smartphone-level options like HDR or ISO control. Photo Sphere and panorama are the standout tricks, letting you create Street View-style 360° images.
Video is reasonably detailed with smooth frame rates, but continuous autofocus tends to hunt, which is annoying. You can knock it down to 720p if you want smaller files.
Connectivity is where the Nexus 7 shows both ambition and compromises. You get dual-band Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC with Android Beam, GPS (with some reported signal-loss issues), microUSB with MTP, USB OTG support, and Qi wireless charging.
Wireless charging is genuinely ahead of its time here, and the fact that the Nexus 7 (2013) is essentially alone in the tablet space with Qi support is impressive. But the lack of USB mass storage mode, the MTP quirks (like some ZIP files not showing up), and no microSD keep it from being as flexible as it could be.
Productivity is mostly handled by Google’s own stack: Drive as the office editor (with optional offline editing), a split-view Calendar that finally makes good use of the larger screen, and a basic Clock, Calculator, Google+, Currents, Maps, and Chrome.
Chrome on tablet is basically desktop Chrome scaled down — tab strip up top, new tab grid, sync with other devices, incognito, and options for search provider switching and preloading links. Flash isn’t officially supported, though you can side-load the Flash Player and use alternative browsers if you really need it.
Pricing, Competition, and the Almost-excellent Verdict
On raw value, the Nexus 7 (2013) is hard to argue with. Pricing starts at $229 for the 16GB Wi‑Fi model, $269 for 32GB Wi‑Fi, and $349 for the 32GB LTE version. The step from 16GB to 32GB is only $40 — a very un-Apple move — and frankly the only sane option if you plan to keep it a while.
Against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 3 7.0 ($199.99) and 8.0 ($299.99), the Nexus 7 wins on hardware. The Tabs offer TouchWiz with better out-of-the-box multimedia support but weaker internals. Asus’ own MeMO Pad HD7 undercuts it at $149, but the cheaper price comes with clearly inferior hardware.
The iPad mini is the real rival in terms of brand and ecosystem, starting at $329. You get a richer tablet app catalog, but worse hardware for more money, and Apple charges a much steeper premium for higher storage tiers. The Nexus 7 looks like the smarter buy unless you’re fully locked into Apple’s ecosystem.
And that’s what makes this tablet slightly frustrating. It nails the fundamentals — build, display, performance, pricing — and then stumbles on basics like speaker direction, expandable storage, stock media playback, and a just-okay camera. None of these are dealbreakers alone, but together they drag it down from “instant buy” to “great if you can live with the quirks.”
Google and Asus clearly learned a lot between the first and second Nexus 7. This version is leaner, more polished, and more powerful, and it absolutely deserves the praise it gets in a vacuum. But for a device positioned as the Android tablet reference, it still feels like Google was oddly conservative in a few key places.
Have thoughts on this? Share them in the comments.
One thought to “Nexus 7 (2013) Revisited: Great Tablet, Avoidable Flaws”