Full Circle Magazine FR

After one long journey too many on public transport, I decided that I needed some sort of pocket-sized entertainment. Yes, I could listen to an audio device while staring blankly out of the window. Yes, I could check my email every five minutes on my mobile phone. Yes, in theory, I could read books on my mobile phone, but, with a 4” screen, it’s not the most pleasant of tasks. I needed a tablet. A pocket-sized tablet. Initially, I looked at a Kindle. Black and white screen, does only text, and must buy from Amazon. There is that Kindle Fire thing. Ditto. There must be something better.

Après un long voyage utilisant trop les transports en commun, j'ai décidé que j'avais besoin d'un divertissement de poche. Oui, je pourrais écouter un appareil audio tout en regardant fixement par la fenêtre. Oui, je pourrais consulter mes emails toutes les cinq minutes sur mon téléphone portable. Oui, en théorie, je pourrais lire des livres sur mon téléphone portable, mais avec un écran 4”, ce n'est pas la plus agréable des tâches.

J'avais besoin d'une tablette. Une tablette de poche.

D'abord, j'ai cherché un Kindle. Écran noir et blanc, que du texte, et achats sur Amazon. Il y a cette chose Kindle Fire. Bon.

Il doit y avoir quelque chose de mieux.

Enter the Nexus 7. Made by ASUS and using Google’s Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), it has a seven inch (full color) touch screen, 8 or 16 GB of storage, and comes with (in most cases) £15 of Google Play credit. Surely it must have a down side? Well, there is one minor niggle: it uses only wifi, there’s no 3G option to give you data everywhere and anywhere. Living where I am in the UK means that I am usually without 3G and wifi, and survive reasonably well. Come the inevitable zombie apocalypse, I reckon I’ll be one of the OK ones. But, should you have an Android mobile phone, then, in most cases (not all!), you should be able to make your phone a wifi hotspot. Tethering it’s called. I’ve done this a few times with my Nexus 7 and it works great.

Allumez le Nexus 7. Fabriqué par ASUS et utilisant Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) de Google, il a un écran tactile de sept pouces (tout en couleur), 8 ou 16 Go de stockage, et est livré avec (dans la plupart des cas) 15 £ de crédit Google Play.

Il doit sûrement y avoir un côté négatif? Eh bien, j'ai un reproche mineur: il n'utilise que le wifi, il n'y a aucune option 3G pour vous connecter partout et n'importe où. Vivre là où je suis au Royaume-Uni signifie que je suis habituellement sans 3G ni wifi, et je survis assez bien. Qu'arrive l'inévitable apocalypse des zombies, je pense que je resterai l'un des survivants. Mais, au cas où vous auriez un téléphone mobile Android, alors, dans la plupart des cas (pas tous!), vous devriez être en mesure de faire de votre téléphone un hotspot wifi. Ça s'appelle le partage de connexion (Tethering). Je l'ai fait quelques fois avec mon Nexus 7 et il fonctionne très bien.

Free Stuff! After logging into the Nexus, 7 you’ll receive an email from Google telling you that your Play account has £15 of credit. The way this works is that you go through the usual process of buying an app (quite simple and painless), and, when you’re on the last step, you’ll see a menu letting you choose between your registered credit card or your Play credit. The Google Play shop is where you get all your installables from. The first screen will present you with some suggestions but also three options: ‘Apps’, ‘Movies’, and ‘Books’. Chose one of those and you’ll be given some featured suggestions. Swiping left will give you a list of categories to browse through. Swiping right will go through a lists of ‘Top Paid’, ‘Top Free’, ‘Top Grossing’, ‘Top New Paid’, ‘Top New Free’, and ‘Trending’. Any item you choose will also suggest other apps based on this choice, and list more apps (if any) by the creator. You can, of course, search titles. Pressing the down arrow beside the search box will list all currently installed apps. Choosing one will give you its normal description, and with the option to uninstall it. This is also where app updates are listed. All in all, the Play shop is very well designed and very easy to use, so there should be no real problems installing/removing apps.

Gratuités !

Après vous être enregistré dans le Nexus 7, vous recevrez un e-mail de Google vous informant que votre compte Google Play a un crédit de 15 £. La façon dont cela fonctionne est que vous passez par le processus habituel d'achat d'applis (tout à fait simple et indolore) et, lorsque vous êtes à la dernière étape, vous verrez un menu vous permettant de choisir entre votre carte de crédit enregistrée ou votre crédit Google Play.

La boutique Google Play est l'endroit à partir duquel vous obtenez tous vos logiciels. Le premier écran vous présentera des suggestions, mais aussi trois options: «Applis», «Cinéma» et «Livres». Choisissez l'une d'entre elle et vous aurez d'autres actualités suggérées. Glisser vers la gauche vous donnera une liste de catégories à parcourir. Glisser vers la droite vous donnera une liste des «Meilleures Ventes», «Top des Gratuits», «Top Cumulé», «Meilleures ventes de nouveautés», «Top des nouveautés grauites» et «Tendances». Tout élément que vous choisirez proposera également d'autres applis basées sur ce choix, et la liste d'autres applis (le cas échéant) réalisées par le même auteur. Vous pouvez, bien sûr, rechercher des titres. Appuyer sur la flèche vers le bas à côté de la case de recherche, listera toutes les applis actuellement installées. En choisir une vous donnera sa description normale, et la possibilité de la désinstaller. C'est aussi là que les mises à jour sont répertoriées.

Dans l'ensemble, la boutique Google Play est très bien conçue et très facile à utiliser, donc il ne devrait y avoir aucun problème réel d'installation ou de retrait d'applis.

Best Of Both Worlds Speaking of apps, not only can I read books from Google Play on this, but I can also install the Amazon Kindle app and read Kindle books on there too. Best of both worlds! Within both the Kindle app and Google Play you can download the books to the device, so you can read your books offline. Google have helpfully included a widget (a little ‘app’ you can drag onto the desktop which can be thought of as being a shortcut) which can display your Play books right on your desktop! A widget can be downloaded from the Play store which will display links to your Kindle books on the desktop too. Here’s my current desktop with ‘MY BOOKS’ (Google Play) and a link to the Kindle edition of ‘The Complete Sherlock Holmes’: Installing Adobe Reader from Google Play will allow you to read and annotate PDF files. Text can vary between PDFs though. Some use large margins and small text, but most PDF books should be easily readable without zooming and scrolling, which is something I hate. If RSS is more your thing, then you can use Google Currents (which comes pre-installed). Handy for reading FCM on the move. Battery life on the Nexus 7 is excellent. With some light reading, and no wifi, I went three days without a charge. Obviously turning on wifi and/or doing more intensive tasks will drain the battery much faster.

Audio/Video If you’ve got wifi access, and you’re in need of some entertainment, you could install one of the many radio apps, or even Netflix. Movies in HD played flawlessly on the Nexus, even with my pretty slow Internet connection. Google Music is included (but called Google Play – which is a bit confusing), and works great showing your album covers as nice big icons. Android no longer uses the old ‘USB Storage’ method for sending/receiving files which has been a problem for Linux in the past. Thankfully, this seems to be improving, but what I’ve been doing is either using an app like ‘WiFi File Explorer’ (WFE), ‘ES File Explorer’ (ESFE), or ‘AirDroid’ to move files back and forth. With WFE, you can wirelessly connect your PC and Nexus using your browser as a controller. You start the WFE app and it will connect to your wifi network and it will give you an address such as http://192.168.0.23:8000. For more on AirDroid, see this month’s Command and Conquer column. Type that into your browser and you’ll be able to access your Nexus to send/receive files. ESFE is a similar idea, but you connect directly to the PC to send/receive files from shared directories. It all sounds complicated just to shuffle files back and forth, but it’s a lot quicker than plugging in the cable and such like.

Head In The Clouds Ubuntu One works dandy with the Nexus 7. I simply installed ubuntuone-control-panel-qt (I use KDE) which gave me a folder in /home called ‘Ubuntu One’, and anything I dropped in there would show in the cloud on the Ubuntu One website and in the Ubuntu One Android app. Adding a file from the Nexus 7 was as simple as pressing the ‘+’ button in the top right of the screen, selecting the type of file to send, then selecting the file itself. After a few seconds, the file was in the cloud. DropBox works flawlessly, and in the same way as Ubuntu One. DropBox came in handy with this review. I took my screenshots of the Nexus screen (hold the power and volume down keys), and sent them to my DropBox account. When writing this review in Google Docs, I simply added the images from my DropBox folder. Cable free! Say Cheese! For a camera – the Nexus 7 has a front facing camera which is quite low resolution, but it’s more than adequate for the facial recognition in Android 4.1 (a cool unlocking feature) and for use in Google+ hangouts. I haven’t tried many games on the Nexus, but Minecraft ran smooth as silk as did Broken Sword (Android remake of the old PC classic), and Pinball HD looked mighty impressive, and, again, smooth as silk. No glitches or slowing down at all.

One new addition to the Android box of tricks is Google Now. With this app you can use text/voice searches, and, based on those searches, it will, over time, build up a series of ‘cards’ that it will display. These cards will give you everything from traffic advice, weather, even public transport timetables. Google is pretty much trying to predict your searches before you even do them! At £199 ($199) the Nexus 7 is an absolute bargain. It’s fast, has a really nice responsive screen, and Android 4.1 is indeed buttery smooth (as Google has been saying). It fits nicely into the palm of the hand, it’s not too heavy, and, more importantly, fits in my jacket pocket!