Well that took a while…

What can I say, life hap­pened . A lot has been hap­pen­ing in tech as always. The new and excit­ing gizmo of the moment has to be the Nexus 7 tablet with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, then there’s Mac OS 10.8 Moun­tain Lion released today. Hav­ing tried these out, there are a few thoughts I have on them.

Nexus 7

The Nexus 7 doesn’t really break new ground. Yes, it is the first 7 inch tablet with a quad core proces­sor yada yada, but the most impor­tant fea­ture it has is wide avail­abil­ity. The Kin­dle Fire was the first powerful-but-easy-on-the-wallet 7 inch tablet. Prob­lem was and still is — you can only get one in the US. Enter the Nexus 7. Boom.

It’s widely avail­able, pow­er­ful and super afford­able. The only other com­pany that has the resources and expe­ri­ence to pull a hat-trick like that is Apple. Maybe that’s why the rumors of a 7.8 inch iPad are start­ing to brew.

Back to the Nexus 7. I wasn’t really sure I was a fan of the 7 inch form fac­tor until I tried it out. I love the iPad but at times I think it’s just too big to take every­where with me. The Nexus 7 is just right. It’s light and just portable enough to go every­where with. It doesn’t get in the way. It is the per­fect bal­ance between mobile phone and tablet.

It’s not with­out flaws though. There are issues with the dis­play that peo­ple are report­ing: the screen is lift­ing off the unit on the left side, dead pix­els, over sat­u­rated images etc. On the fea­tures side, it lacks a micro SD slot — a trend that seems to be get­ting more com­mon with mobile devices. The iPhone is to blame, pity the HTC One X had to fol­low suit. Despite these petty issues, it costs about half the price of the low end iPad so… hey,16 gig will suffice.

Over­all, great device at a rea­son­able price. Jelly Bean is also a great update to ICS. It doesn’t add a whole lot in terms of fea­tures but it adds spit and pol­ish to a solid Android OS. I will be look­ing for­ward to the JB update HTC promised on my One X.

Moun­tain Lion

Mac OS 10.8 is a big­ger shift to iOS than Lion (10.7) was. It’s bolder and more refined than its pre­de­ces­sor. There are more than 200 new fea­tures but the ones I have actu­ally noticed with­out dig­ging in are few.
Visu­ally it looks and feels about the same. There’s a new noti­fi­ca­tion cen­tre icon in the top right cor­ner where spot­light used to be. The dock has lost its glossy reflec­tions aaand that’s about it. It has a new dic­ta­tion fea­ture, a bunch of new apps from iOS, noti­fi­ca­tions and improved per­for­mance. At $US20 there’s no rea­son not to love the update. It make a cou­ple of com­mer­cial apps like Growl noti­fi­ca­tions redun­dant. Awe­some, unless you’d already paid for them

Well that’s all for now, tune in next year on some ran­dom day when some ran­dom things hap­pen in tech and I have time to write about them!