Last Updated on November 3, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
I haven’t mentioned Google’s upcoming Nexus 7 tablet yet. If you haven’t heard about it somehow, it’s a 7-inch, quad-core tablet with 1 GB of RAM, priced at $199, and running Android 4.1. So think of it like a souped-up Kindle Fire.
The worst thing I’ve read about it is that the $199 model only has 5.92 GB of usable storage left on it. To me, the 16 GB model, priced at $249, would be the way to go, but you can fill 16 GB (of which probably 13.92 GB would be available) pretty quickly too.
Beyond the technical details, Ifixit says it’s possible to repair. In fact, it’s right between the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet in repairability.
The other fault I find with the device is the lack of any kind of SD card slot. That makes sense–Google wants you to use the device to stream content from the cloud, because that’s where they’ll make their money. I’m more interested in locally stored content, which means I’m not the kind of profitable customer Google is seeking.
That’s the main reason I haven’t ordered one yet. To me, the ideal tablet would have specs along the lines of the Nexus 7, but allow me to swap in SD cards so I can rotate 32 GB of storage in and out of it.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.