Posted December 13, 2013
Rant warning from long winded typer. (sorry I don't understand brevity)
So I obviously have a gen 1 Nexus 7. I grabbed it last January after some debate over it and the Nook HD. I've mostly used it to send music to whatever, and control my Roku. That and some night time Netflix/Hulu action.
For the whole time I've owned it I've had a heck of a time swiping my unlock code in. Never on the first try, and as much as 8 or 9 tries at time to get an unbroken swipe. Beyond that I was happy with it since all I was doing was poking it here and there to fire something up. More recently I have been trying to do more and found getting an uninterrupted swipe was quite rare. Internet surfing was difficult when it kept thinking I was clicking things instead of swiping. Then I tried to play Angry Birds for the first time and there was no way to do it. At that point I was getting very annoyed with it and was convinced something in the background was monkeying with the thing, but couldn't figure out what since a lot of people were starting to complain about the new N7's having bad touch screens.
I got so annoyed with it that I ended up buying a Nook HD when I saw it was 80$ at B&N on Black Friday. Even though it should be slightly inferior it doesn't have any of the same issues, nor does my dad's older nook Tablet for that matter. I then was bothered that I was replacing it when the thing should work right, and a little more google and I found the magic search term that led me to Google Currents which apparently was jacking up Nexus 7 by syncing in the background. Disabling that nonsense helped quite a bit until I then saw the kit kat update icon. I thought, “It's been a couple of weeks, so it should be OK now...”
Kit Kat just feels slow. Even though I could mostly play Angry Birds I could no longer use Google Chrome because it just couldn't keep up and the hiccups were registering as clicks taking me all over the internet against my will. Hulu Plus was worse only moving about half the distance of a swipe and causing accidental clicks. Google Music, same as Chrome. Then came a fix 4.4.3 and when I saw speed improvements I thought, oh good maybe they sorted this out.
The touch screen went crazy. Like it was before only 5x worse. I couldn't maintain a steady click for more than half a second if I was lucky, and nothing that got slower sped up. The touch screen was so bad it rendered the device unusable. I thought about currents getting reset and found it had been merged with something into newsstand and they actually removed the option to disable background syncing. The fix for a well known problem on their well known device and they removed it. They didn't remove the “only when charging” option which will effectively do the same thing, but damn they seem to be working hard at making this thing unusable.
I want so bad to like the blasted thing, but I've seen way too many “lesser” tablets not be half as frustrating, and feels like it's just wasted potential. The hardware seems fine, and there are glimpses of what it should be like, but it just a jerky, uneven mess at this point.
I know I took the long way around, but anyone else have a similar story with one?
So I obviously have a gen 1 Nexus 7. I grabbed it last January after some debate over it and the Nook HD. I've mostly used it to send music to whatever, and control my Roku. That and some night time Netflix/Hulu action.
For the whole time I've owned it I've had a heck of a time swiping my unlock code in. Never on the first try, and as much as 8 or 9 tries at time to get an unbroken swipe. Beyond that I was happy with it since all I was doing was poking it here and there to fire something up. More recently I have been trying to do more and found getting an uninterrupted swipe was quite rare. Internet surfing was difficult when it kept thinking I was clicking things instead of swiping. Then I tried to play Angry Birds for the first time and there was no way to do it. At that point I was getting very annoyed with it and was convinced something in the background was monkeying with the thing, but couldn't figure out what since a lot of people were starting to complain about the new N7's having bad touch screens.
I got so annoyed with it that I ended up buying a Nook HD when I saw it was 80$ at B&N on Black Friday. Even though it should be slightly inferior it doesn't have any of the same issues, nor does my dad's older nook Tablet for that matter. I then was bothered that I was replacing it when the thing should work right, and a little more google and I found the magic search term that led me to Google Currents which apparently was jacking up Nexus 7 by syncing in the background. Disabling that nonsense helped quite a bit until I then saw the kit kat update icon. I thought, “It's been a couple of weeks, so it should be OK now...”
Kit Kat just feels slow. Even though I could mostly play Angry Birds I could no longer use Google Chrome because it just couldn't keep up and the hiccups were registering as clicks taking me all over the internet against my will. Hulu Plus was worse only moving about half the distance of a swipe and causing accidental clicks. Google Music, same as Chrome. Then came a fix 4.4.3 and when I saw speed improvements I thought, oh good maybe they sorted this out.
The touch screen went crazy. Like it was before only 5x worse. I couldn't maintain a steady click for more than half a second if I was lucky, and nothing that got slower sped up. The touch screen was so bad it rendered the device unusable. I thought about currents getting reset and found it had been merged with something into newsstand and they actually removed the option to disable background syncing. The fix for a well known problem on their well known device and they removed it. They didn't remove the “only when charging” option which will effectively do the same thing, but damn they seem to be working hard at making this thing unusable.
I want so bad to like the blasted thing, but I've seen way too many “lesser” tablets not be half as frustrating, and feels like it's just wasted potential. The hardware seems fine, and there are glimpses of what it should be like, but it just a jerky, uneven mess at this point.
I know I took the long way around, but anyone else have a similar story with one?
