Google Nexus 7 Box (I might still have this somewhere…)
Foreword:
As has become something of a Christmas Eve tradition for me over the years, I was faced with a new challenge with my aging Google Nexus 7 (2012). I only have 2 games that I play on either my phones or the Nexus 7: Flow and Flow Free Hexes. Both games received updates that rendered them incompatible with the CyanogenMod 10.2 (Jelly Bean 4.3) ROM I was using, and since those games encompass my bedtime “chill out” ritual, that was major a problem. Upon a bit of research however I made a radical discovery that people made not just Android Nougat work on the archaic Nexus 7, but even an Oreo build as well. (Though I was unable to get GApps to work with that due to storage limitations.) That’s 3 or 4 new versions of Android since the Nexus 7’s debut of Jelly Bean, and what’s even more incredible, is with some mods it can still perform like it came out of the box in 2012.
Nexus 7 unveiling at Google I/O 2012.
Background:
The Nexus 7 has its place in history, and its own array of lore. Google had employed its Nexus brand on phones previously, beginning with the Nexus One in January 2010 featuring Android Froyo 2.2. The Nexus 7 however was Google’s first attempt at a tablet, in the midst of a market that up to that point was dominated by the Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad. The popularity of Apple’s iOS devices up to that point proved to be a monumental challenge for Android to wrest any semblance of market dominance. While HTC was the hardware supplier for past Nexus products, the Nexus 7 would be headed by Asus instead. The Nexus 7 had an incredibly short development cycle of about 4 months.
Asus would attempt to overcome this by repurposing their Eee Pad MeMO 370T from the previous year into the new Google design. It wasn’t a drop-in replacement however, the Nexus 7 was advertised as being a $199 tablet, which necessitated a significant overhaul to reach the lower price point. All in all, the Nexus 7’s low price didn’t translate to it being cheap at all, as it had plenty of performance to offer. Asus went to great lengths to ensure it was efficient with battery life.
The Nexus 7 met its goal for a May 2012 release, featuring the new Android Jelly Bean 4.1 and coming in 2 storage sizes of 8 GB for $199 and 16 GB for $249. The initial 2012 model did not ship with any cellular connectivity at all, instead relying exclusively on WiFi for connecting to the internet. Later in the year the 8 GB model was dropped and the 16 GB was sold at the lower price point of $199. The Jelly Bean operating system used Google’s Android Open Source Project (AOSP) variant, meaning it was uninhibited by any manufacturer skins or carrier bloatware, making it a “pure Android” experience. The software of the device was highly enthusiast friendly, as the bootloader was easily unlockable and a wealth of different firmwares were available to flash.
Among the software features that shipped with the Nexus 7 were the new for Jelly Bean, Google Now, a personal assistant integrated into Google Search intended to combat Apple’s Siri. Google Play was also a highly touted feature, bringing about an “ecosystem” of apps for Books, Movies, Music, Games, Magazines, and even TV shows. Whereas most Android products only receive 1 operating system update, the Nexus 7 received updates to KitKat and Lollipop, version 5.1.1 being the final officially supported release. Being part of Google’s Nexus line, the Nexus 7 was among the first devices to receive operating system updates, unaffected by delayed update release schedules of cellular carriers.
My Nexus 7 wielding the way more modern Android Nougat 7.1.
The Nexus 7 Experience:
I was among the first buyers of the Nexus 7 in 2012, I was highly urged by my wife to buy one because it was a hot new item and it would be a vast upgrade over the HTC Merge phones we used at the time. Although the Merge was advertised as being on the list of devices to receive Android Ice Cream Sandwich, it wound up being cut in the 11th hour for not having enough RAM, so the Nexus 7 would be the first glimpse into the new design. With more storage available, my wife was able to fill the tablet up with probably 60 games. When we first got it I think I played Bubble Pop Plus once and watched a few videos, because I had a 7″ screen at my disposal. For the ensuing next 2 years, I didn’t see it again. Upon switching our phone service to Verizon in November 2014, they threw in a free Ellipsis tablet; at long last, I got access to the Nexus 7 again.
There’s a bit of an urban legend that the earliest Nexus 7 2012 had defective memory modules that would slow the tablet to a crawl eventually. I found that theory to be a little unusual considering it exhibited no such slowdown when it was new; it wasn’t until Christmas Eve 2014 that I unlocked the bootloader and flashed different firmwares that this would become more evident. The Nexus Root Toolkit enables flashing various stock ROMs straight from Google, I figured I would give one of the latest releases a whirl. Sure enough, it was very slow. I had to go back to the drawing board. I had to escalate matters to rooting it next.
Yeah, I can still be geeky if I try hard enough.
Performance Boosting:
Anyone familiar with solid state drives are probably aware of trimming. A TRIM command wipes unused blocks of data in a solid state device to curb the performance degradation of write processes. I wound up downgrading back to CyanogenMod 10.2, based on Jelly Bean 4.3, which was just a newer version of the software the Nexus 7 came with. Early adopters of Android more than likely know an app called Taskiller; you wind up using that a lot here. An additional app called FSTrim, which requires Superuser root access, is used to trim the memory. The tandem of these apps will brute force clean up the memory if ever performance starts to slow down. There is a better option however… called F2FS (Flash-Friendly File System). Reformatting of the DATA and CACHE partitions using a custom bootloader like TeamWin Recovery Project (TWRP, apparently pronounced like ‘twerp’) from EXT4 to F2FS will eliminate the need to manually trim entirely. I finally put this to use with a much newer Android Nougat firmware. Despite the fact that Nougat is well beyond where Jelly Bean was in 2012, there’s not much in the way of performance decrease, in fact with the aid of F2FS, it runs even faster. You may get a hint of some memory thrash when switching between apps, but it catches up fast enough that the lag disappears.
Demonstration of that gnarly gap in the back door from opening it up too many times.
The Aging Process:
Upon the Nexus 7’s release it was widely praised for its high build quality. We have to take into account however that this was 8.5 years ago and there would be a few war wounds along the way. Despite the efforts that went into the placement of the speakers (which was done so that the remainder of the motherboard design wouldn’t hinder the quality of the sound output) I have to say the speakers are not great. I have difficulty hearing them, and to make things particularly bizarre for bedside audio listening, plugging earbuds in results in sound still being played out of the speakers. Or even more frustrating, only one channel of audio works. This appears to be a part that fails often, and replacements can still be obtained. The factory original charger was every bit as frustrating. With its slow rate of charge, you can have the tablet plugged in and it loses power because it can’t keep up. Over the course of the last year I would leave the tablet plugged in throughout the day and would come home to get ready to go to sleep and find it didn’t charge at all. I wound up taking the charge port apart and plugged everything back in again and it seemed to cure this issue. Phones are often a major hassle to open up, but to my surprise Asus made the Nexus 7 easy to open, the back door pops right off like the removable battery phones of old. Well, I wound up breaking some of the clips on the door, it doesn’t exactly sit on flush anymore. (I might have to get fancy with hot glue soon.)
No spudgers or gap tools needed, it was like Asus wanted this to be torn into.
Once Innovative Old Technology in a New Decade:
We arrived in the 2020 decade nearly a year ago, in a time where technology advances at a rapid pace, it’s virtually unheard of to continue using a device such as the Nexus 7 nearly 9 years later. In spite of the fact that the charm mostly lie in its utility and casual appeal, Asus produced a true enthusiast piece that continues to have aftermarket support to this day. The fact such an early Android device has 6 different versions of the operating system available to run on it, 2 of which were purely custom efforts, is staggering. For as much as I’ve let this unit sit on a charger for years now, the battery will sit at 100% for a fair amount of heavy usage on some days, and others it will start to drop quickly. The battery still works pretty well all things considered, when I have bad days with my neck and I spend a lot of time in bed, I can run my Unity-based Flow games for quite awhile before it becomes a catastrophic emergency to put it down for a few hours to recharge. It’s funny that a month ago for Black Friday I was seriously contemplating finally replacing the Nexus 7, but after sorting out the charge port and OS issues, having Nougat now gives the illusion that it’s like a new tablet. I’ll need to put it through its trials a little longer to see how the battery drain works out, but I have a pretty decent handle on how to disable features to conserve energy.
It wound up being among the best $250 I ever spent. The Nexus 7, another in the long line of my ancient legacy hardware that still gets put to good use.
(All images not taken by my also aging Motorola Moto X4 were sourced from Wikipedia)