Lucky Number 7

The Nexus 7, the first tablet to wear Google’s Nexus brand, sets a new standard for smaller slates, proving that just because it isn’t as big as Apple’s iPad doesn’t mean it can’t be just as useful, as fast, or as fun. If you’ve been on the fence about Android, or tablets in general, this is the tablet you’ve been waiting for.

While the Nexus 7 isn’t a full-on iPad-killer, it far out-classes anything else offered in the 7-inch category, and most 10-inch tablets too. The Nexus 7 does this by offering smartly designed, powerful hardware and the best Android tablet experience to date. For those who only use their gadgets to surf the web, check e-mail, play games and update their social media feeds, the Nexus 7 might be an even better choice than an iPad, given how much easier it is to carry around.

But the feature that will probably be the most enticing to consumers is the price. The Nexus 7 sells for $200 with 8GB of storage. That’s the same price as the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet at the same storage capacity. If you want a bit more room to download HD movies, music, games and apps, you can get the 16GB version for $250. At these prices, the Nexus 7 is frankly a steal when you compare it to what else is out there at the same cost.

The 1280×800 IPS touchscreen is beautiful. It’s the best display I’ve seen on a 7-inch tablet, and almost as good as the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity and the third-generation iPad. It’s not quite Retina display quality, but with a pixel density of 216ppi, it’s very close. Colors are balanced without being over-saturated, a common issue on many mobile devices nowadays, particularly those from Samsung.

Also absent are any software performance problems. Where the Fire and Nook suffer from unresponsiveness, slow animations and stuttering screens, the Nexus 7 screams. In fact, Google’s tablet responds as quickly and scrolls as smoothly as just about any tablet I’ve seen, no matter the size. It feels as fast as Asus’ larger Transformer tablets, and it performs as smoothly as the iPad, even when playing high definition games such as ShadowGun or playing back HD movies.

Basically, the Nexus 7 is a beast. Navigating around Android 4.1 Jelly Bean (yes, this is the first Jelly Bean tablet) is super clean. There’s no hesitation on the part of the Nexus 7 when loading magazines, books, apps, video, games, music or web pages.

This can be attributed to Nvidia’s 1.2GHz Tegra 3 quad-core processor — yep, this is the first quad-core 7-inch tablet, too. Alongside that is a 12-core Nvidia GPU and 1GB of RAM. The only noticeable delay comes when you first turn on the Nexus 7. There’s a lag of a few seconds while your content loads into the interactive home screen widgets pre-installed by Google.

The widgets show you what content — books, music, magazines, movies and TV shows — is available in the Google Play store for you to consume, via either streaming or downloading.

These widgets make extensive use of cover art, so they are colorful and attractive. They’re easy to use, expanding and contracting as you cycle through the various options. Most importantly, they reduce a lot of the friction around finding stuff in Google Play, both for content you’ve already purchased, as well as enticing new options. The widgets are very much “in your face,” and they clearly suggest that Google intends to be your go-to destination for buying, renting and streaming digital media.

The Fire and the Nook — the Nexus 7′s primary competitors, which also follow the “device as content portal” philosophy — also offer an array of entertainment options on their home screens, but Google’s arrangement is far prettier to look and less intrusive. Amazon Fire’s shows a cludgy carousel of content, and even that’s better than the random assortment of book covers found on the Nook’s home screen.

These Google Play widgets come installed by default on every Nexus 7, but you can easily remove them and use a fully customized Android home screen of your own design. If you’re not into buying content from Google, you can download Amazon’s apps and get your stuff there. You can still get Netflix, or Hulu for video. Rdio, Mog, Spotify, Pandora and other music streaming services are there, too. This isn’t a user experience that forces you to buy all your content from one storefront.

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iPads could scan palms for passwords

By Matt Liebowitz

Like palm-activated ATMs and retina-scanning smartphones, tablet computers like the iPad may soon authenticate their rightful users by reading the unique movement of their hands, not their passwords.

Napa Sae-Bae, a doctoral student at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, is working to build an app that, using multitouch sensors, will biometrically authenticate tablet users' hand gestures. Her goal, she told NextGov, is for the tablet device to recognize its owner's specific biological traits — their hand shape and finger length, for example — and use those unique characteristics, which do not change, to replace passwords, which run the risk of being cracked.

Although she says it will be at least a year before her app is ready, Sae-Bae has already developed an iPad app that asks users to make gestures on a touch screen, such as rotating an open palm and opening a closed fist, in order to verify their identity. The hand sensor technologies she's using are currently available and already used, in different capacities, on iPads and Android tablets.

She also built a biometric-analyzing algorithm that will be the technological basis of the app; in experiments with 34 people, she achieved a 90 percent accuracy rate in authenticating the hand movements made by each participant, NextGov said.

Sae-Bae's work falls in line with other advancements in biometric authentication that have made headlines in recent months, both for the consumer market and for the government. As part of its human measurements and signatures intelligence (human MASINT) program, the U.S. Air Force has expressed interest in developing security cameras that can detect a suspect's age and ethnicity, and even whether that person is a terrorist smuggling a bomb.

Last month, a Japanese bank announced that beginning in September, it would equip 10 ATMs with biometric sensors that read customers' palms for identity verification.