Asus Nexus7 Tablet Users?

[sleddriver]

Been mousing around with it the past hour. Set up gmail, opted out of as much as I can presently find. Found FF and wanted to install. However, FF for Android ap tells me installing it will allow 'it' to record from the mic anytime it wants to, take pictures and videos "at any time without your permission", gps will be used to determine where I am "and may consume additional battery power".

WTH?

So does this mean the FF 'ap' can and will over-ride my privacy settings at 'its' will "at any time without my permission"?

I'm reminded of the CW song "What part of NO don't you understand?"

FF on the DT doesn't ask these questions. Please advise.

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

Skip firefox for Android, use the UC Browser or Maxthon, both are very usable. UC is real good, just as good as Chrome IMO.

 

[sleddriver]

I'll have a look.

I moused around some more. Dwnld'd FF. Ads everywhere. Installed AB+ and no joy. The subscription service was blank and wouldn't allow me to select one. Odd. So I installed Ghostery, enabled all, and reloaded sites. Nice & clean! Pages loads are also much faster.

I noticed the N7 is constantly 'updating' its origin aps, ie maps, goog search, goog+, messenger...stuff I've never even used. Still learning to use it.

I can also see why some complain about battery life on tablets & phones in general. It's amazing how much stuff was running in the background I didn't start. All consuming mem. & pwr. I went through turning them off.

Perhaps Chrome is more secure than FF. Don't know. Use FF. Still learning the interface. I'll have to go through the owners manual with it in hand as I don't know where everything is.

 

[Hokiefyd]

Originally Posted By: sleddriver
I can also see why some complain about battery life on tablets & phones in general. It's amazing how much stuff was running in the background I didn't start. All consuming mem. & pwr. I went through turning them off.


Yes and no. These mobile operating systems allocate memory a little differently than a traditional desktop OS. A lot of applications are "open", but they're really in a "sleep" state and get kicked out of memory if something that you are using needs it. It's not quite like a desktop OS where if you leave an application open, it stays "running". App killers really don't do any good on mobile devices, at least not since the earliest versions of Android were upgraded 4-5 years ago.

Here's an article that describes it better than I probably did.

http://www.tested.com/tech/android/923-android-task-killers-are-deadheres-what-you-should-be-doing/

Ironically, killing apps can cause more load on the system because those services have to fully re-start when they are needed by the OS.

 

[accent2012]

I love it. I watch movies/shows in bed over my LAN via ES explore and MX player. the chip on these can handle 1080p .mkv video containers fairly well. I also watch netflix and u-verse TV on it via firefox or chrome and I have the first-gen I believe.

Not a ton of accessories like the iPad, which to some people can be used almost entirely as their PC.

Depending on your needs, the Nexus can possibly become your PC, only problem I've seen is that there aren't any decent keyboard accessories for it, and it would be nice if it was easily upgradeable to give it 3g/4g capability to have Internet anywhere you are.

 

[sleddriver]

Spent more time with it in hand last night while reading the manual on-line. Learned how to get rid of default aps at the bottom of the home page and put FF there.

Noticed the mini-USB wasn't in the box so I'll have to pick one up.

Would be nice if I could move over some of my OpenOffice docs for reading. I think it would be very handy for astronomy use with the public as well, though I'd have to cover the screen with a red gell or -2 ND gell.

Might also come in handy for mobile map & navigation use...if the reflections aren't too bad. Not a fan of glossy glass screens at all due to glare and reflections.

Reading the manual really helped in understanding the thing.

 

[Errtt]

I bought an ASUS tablet for the wife. I know nothing about it. All I've seen her do was play games on it. Guess she's happy with it.
In fact, she's sitting next to the grill messing with it. Hope the baby backs don't burn.

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

To enhance battery life, there's a number of things to be sure aren't running...no auto-app updates from the Google Play store for one. Same goes for iPhones and iPads.

If the GPS is on longer than a few seconds, the battery will drain faster.

Keep the screen brightness down a notch.

Not using it for several hours? Put airplane mode on, battery life will dramatically increase if you enable airplane mode when not using the unit for long periods of time.

 

[sleddriver]

Update:

Dove head first into a shallow pool re: ESPN & Flash. Evidently flash isn't supported. Further, an ESPN rep informed me that there are some things I can view using a confuser that I can't view using a tablet due to an inability to verify permissions? Still confused on this one..... I wanted to hook the N7 to the garage stereo to play a baseball game while working out there. Looks like I'll have to take an old LT out there to do it, not the tablet.

I noticed on an Android site a few work-arounds for getting flash to work. I also noticed that if I could load the HTML5 ESPN page (instead of flash), that might be another way. Not sure how to do this though. Evidently some OS's or servers are smart enough to redirect and others are not??

I'm out of my league here. Any tablet users who watch sports out there? Thanks.

 

[RTexasF]

We have the older one like yours and she simply loves it. Great screen for ebooks. It updated to the newest version of KitKat recently. I wish my android phone would update as rapidly.

 

[Nick R]

The Nexus tablets are fantastic, particularly if you use chrome on your computer at home, and have an android phone. I like that all of my stuff is sync'ed across all devices. Frankly, if there is any one company/Entity I trust with my data, it's google. If they use it to send a few targeted ads my way, so what? The convenience to me outweighs the potential cons. Not like I have anything to hide, anyway.

Even if you have the older model, it's still a great little device for internet surfing, music, facebook, etc. If you are concerned with the location aspect you can disable that in the settings, it will also ask once you actually set it up, do you want to enable/disable it, if you really want to. Mainly they use it to determine where wireless networks are.

For example, if I'm connected to my grandmothers wifi, and I open up google maps, it will know that particular wifi macID is at my grandmothers house, and will place me there, even if the GPS is turned off.