Google Nexus 7 Tablet: Jelly Bean And Much More

Google wanted to create a device that is optimized for use with all of the content in the Google Play store. As you can see from looking at two of the default home screens, Google is definitely highlighting the content capabilities of the Nexus 7. From books to magazines to movies, the Nexus 7 is designed to provide easy and quick access to your favorite content. The Nexus 7 has five customizable home screens. Out of the box, three of the five home screens have no widgets or content, so they're ready for you to customize.

The Nexus 7 runs on Android 4.1, Jelly Bean. With Jelly Bean, you'll get new Google Play widgets, Google Now, new notification controls, and more. Google describes Google Now as a feature that "will give you just the right information at just the right time", whatever that means. 

You can access Google Now by swiping up from the bottom of the tablet. Now provides helpful information such as nearby places, traffic information, scores for your favorite team, and more. You can configure some settings in Google Now but for the most part, the feature is designed to use contextual data from your tablet and other Google products as well as data from third-party products to determine the most relevant information to display.

Some of the factors Google Now considers are the time of day, your location, your location history, your Web history, and information from synced calendar entries among other things. You can dismiss a card from the Google Now screen by swiping it away.

With the new notification shade, you'll be able to expand certain notifications to show more information using pinch-and-zoom controls. When relevant, you'll also see options to snooze or email guests with select notifications. You can open the app that's related to the notification by pressing the icon on the left. You can dismiss notifications by swiping them away.

In order to give you a pure Jelly Bean experience, Asus and Google didn't preload the Nexus 7 with extra apps. As you can see from the app listing, you'll get the standard Google apps – Gmail, Chrome, Google+, and YouTube – without extra clutter.

The Nexus 7 is the first device to ship with Chrome as the standard browser. With Chrome, you'll get support for unlimited tabs, the ability to rearrange tabs, and Incognito tabs. With its quad-core-plus-one Tegra 3 SoC with GeForce graphics, gyroscope, and accelerometer, the Nexus 7 is also designed with gaming in mind.