Today I took the Nexus 7 out in the city and rampage around in search of a computer shop. Using the hotspot option in my iPhone i funneled some 3G interwebs to the Nexus 7.

The screen:

Practically unusable even at full brightness. I had to seek out sunscreens and indoor areas to read it. Even after enabling auto brightness it didn’t work very well. However, for a glossy screen this was to be expected.

Comparing to my iPhone it was quite a poor experience though. The iPhone was much better readable with a manual setting of about 50% brightness.

Search results:

When i search for “computer shop” or “computer parts” I get decent results. Except, and I found this out today, there aren’t any shops nearby, apparently. Pity.

But when searching with the same phrases in Dutch, the results were a lot less useful and much more colorful. Searching for “computer winkel” (winkel = shop) I found practically anything from Insurance offices to Ice vendors. And a few computer related stores. But not the actual computer shops I was looking for. Which renders the “local” function on my Nexus a lot less useful.

Talking:

We’ve tried to talk to the Nexus 7 too. In english it works pretty well. But in Dutch not at all. Even though Dutch is in the list of languages. The auto-language detector doesn’t recognize Dutch and when manually setting Dutch it doesn’t work very well either. Thinking we were talking about bicycles when we wanted “something to eat” (“iets te eten” vs “fietsen”) which in dutch can sound quite similar.