The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet [LWN.net]

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 1, 2012 4:17 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262)
In reply to: The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet by denials
Parent article: The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

It works well for Google Hangouts. I've used it to test them. I'm torn toward getting my mom one of these tablets in the end, because it's something I can give her with the words "to see your son any time, do this" and she'll actually be able to video conference without lots of hassle. Important if you live 3,000+ miles away and visit once a year...

But on the N7. I'm not as impressed as I had hoped to be, as followers of mine on G+ already know. It won't talk ActiveSync properly to our (Open Source, Zimbra) mail server at work, though older Google Android versions work fine, as does Jelly Bean on my Galaxy Nexus phone. Hopefully, that's a fixable bug. For now, that makes it a deal breaker for daily use because I need to have the office in every moment of my life ;) Beyond that, the switch to Chrome seems to have killed decent flash support. I'll ignore any "but but but HTML5!" comments. The world still runs on flash, and the lack of decent support is something Google and Adobe should just figure out. I'm a consumer, I don't want an excuse about why these things don't just work.

Overall, the N7 is pretty polished. There are some issues with Jelly Bean that will hopefully be resolved in an update. It's still not an iPad, but it's getting incrementally closer to that user experience.

Jon.

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The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 1, 2012 5:07 UTC (Wed) by aryonoco (guest, #55563) [Link] (4 responses)

It's not the switch to Chrome that has killed Flash on JellyBean. It's Adobe discontinuing their mobile Flash development. According to Adobe, Flash will not work and will not be supported on any version of Android past ICS.

On my Galaxy Nexus, I still have the old 'Browser' as well as Chrome, and Flash doesn't work since the update to JellyBean.

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 1, 2012 16:41 UTC (Wed) by Beolach (guest, #77384) [Link] (2 responses)

I thought Adobe had said they were killing their support for Flash in Linux, because only Android mattered? Now they're killing support for Android, too?

Both seem like really stupid moves to me... it's only going to lead to less market share for Flash. Which I'm actually OK with, but I'm surprised Adobe is...

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 2, 2012 5:45 UTC (Thu) by aryonoco (guest, #55563) [Link] (1 responses)

Adobe is dramatically scaling back development of Flash, and as part of it they have discontinued development of both Flash on Linux (other than through Chrome) and Flash Mobile.

Adobe is in the business of selling development tools. They can see, as well as anyone else, that the writing is on the wall and Flash's days are numbered, so instead of committing resources to a sinking ship, they are gracefully putting Flash to rest and making themselves ready for the next big thing (which right now seems to be HTML5).

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 3, 2012 19:03 UTC (Fri) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

I say good riddance to Flash. The time when Google needed it to differentiate from iPhone is long past. Now it seems flash is mainly used to power game sites for kids. Hopefully good riddance to that in favor of HTML 5. Thankfully, the era of flash menus is now a fading, painful memory. 99% of the Flash I see these days is ads, animated in exquisitely bad taste.

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 5, 2012 14:46 UTC (Sun) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link]

Flash still works for me in Jelly Bean on my Galaxy Nexus. Entering fullscreen by long pressing things is broken, but it works otherwise.