From the front, you see no blemishes on the device save for the awkwardly off-center camera lens there's another, larger lens on the back, plus a small Asus tag and a huge Nexus logo. The Micro USB port on the bottom is used for charging and syncing, while the volume and power controls sit on the tapered right edge. The Nexus 7's 16:10 aspect ratio already makes it look gangly and tall, but the huge bezels turn it into an eighth-grader that grew a foot without gaining a pound. The mismatched bezels also make the screen look smaller, and the tablet looks asymmetrical - it's nice to have a place to put your hands when you hold the tablet sideways, but no one needs this much space. Google opted not to shrink the bezels above and below the display, which now look comically gigantic in comparison. I can grasp it like a phone, holding the tablet in my palm and tapping on the screen with my thumb - the iPad mini requires two hands, one to hold the device and the other to use it. Google shaved a quarter of an inch off the bezels on either side of the display, which makes the device fit much more easily into my hand as well. It's also about a credit card thicker than the iPad mini, and almost exactly as tall. At 8.65 mm thick, it's slightly slimmer than the last model, and at 0.64 pounds slightly lighter as well. The matte black back no longer looks or feels like Steve McQueen's leathery driving gloves, but it's still soft to the touch and much nicer to hold than some of the glossy, plastic backs on devices like the Galaxy Tab 3 8.0. But a year is a long time, and maybe this would be the one. Then I looked over at the Nexus 7 I bought last year, which I loved to pieces.

This would solve all my problems! It has a fantastic display, a great processor, all the books and magazines and movies I want, and it's so small and light it'll go everywhere with me. So when Google announced the new, $229 Nexus 7, I immediately leapt to the pre-order page. It didn't, really - movies don't look that great on the mini's screen, magazines take about 46 years to download, and oh man are there a lot of fun games on iOS that are more exciting than Schindler's List. Last fall, I bought an iPad mini hoping that consolidating all those things into one place would make me more likely to do them. My credit card bill makes me look worldly and educated - my actual habits involve a lot of watching It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and re-reading The Da Vinci Code. I constantly buy books I really ought to read, subscribe to magazines that are so good the one time a year I actually get around to opening them, and add movies like Schindler's List to my Netflix queue because it's an important cultural touchstone.

Update nexus 7 2013