Aggressive prices will make the 2012 holiday buying season the biggest yet for 7-inch tablets...but how to pick the right one? Here's help.
The small tablets, though, play by a whole different set of rules. You have 7-inchers with high-def screens, in the form of the fall-2012 updates of Amazon's and Barnes & Noble's compact tablets (the $199 Amazon Kindle Fire HD and $199 Nook HD, respectively), as well as last year's hit Amazon model, the Kindle Fire, dropping to $159 with some moderate internal upgrades. You also have solid Android-based models such as the Google Nexus 7 by Asus. The $160 to $249 range is the main meeting point for these tablets,
with one outlier: Apple's iPad Mini, which starts at $329 for a Wi-Fi-only model with 16GB of onboard storage. The iPad Mini has garnered much of the press of late, but it's more of a 'tweener tab, with a slightly larger 7.9-inch screen and an outsized entry price.
As a whole, though, the best 7-inch tablets share some traits apart from screen size. The 7-inch size is a much more manageable one for travel, just right for one-handed use, and lighter than the 10-inch class for extended sessions spent holding your tablet in front of you, such as when commuting. And the 7-inch tablets are something of a crossover size that also work well for e-book reading. The leading dedicated e-book reading devices, such as the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite and Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch With Glowlight, have monochrome screens only slightly smaller. With the proliferation of e-book reader apps that work in Android or iOS, you can use your 7-inch tablet as a secondary, or even only, e-reader.
The Buying Basics
So, how to choose the best 7-inch tablet among this lot? Consider these five factors below. As a general-purpose pick around $200, however, we are partial to the Google Nexus 7, unless you are heavily tied into either Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble and looking for an e-reader and tablet in one.
The operating system and apps. At the 7-inch size, the only operating systems you'll find in mainstream tablets are Android (more or less unmodified versions of Android 4, as well as highly customized, or "skinned" versions in models like Amazon's Kindle Fires and B&N's Nook HD) and Apple's iOS 6 in the iPad Mini. (An up-and-coming third option, Microsoft's Windows RT, hasn't yet shown up in a compact tablet we've tested, though we imagine some are coming.) The two most recent versions of Android, called "Ice Cream Sandwich" and "Jellybean," are the ones to look for in a new tablet; older, bargain-model tablets running Android 3 flavors are less desirable buys, considering what you can get for $200 now.
Your OS pick, though, is less a decision point than a reality check: If you own, say, an iPhone and loads of apps for it, some of these apps may be workable on an iPad Mini, too; likewise, an Android smartphone paired with an Android tablet. The OSs themselves, however, are a matter of choice, with large amounts of apps available for each. To our eyes, there's a slight to moderate ease-of-use and app-quality advantage for iOS, but Android is a perfectly viable alternative, especially if you're familiar using it on a smartphone. Note that the Kindle and Nook interfaces are quite different from stock Android, however, and are built to serve the online stores they front for.
YOUR INTENDED USAGE. General-use Android tablets like the Google Nexus 7 or Samsung Galaxy Tabs rely on apps you download from the Google Play Store for the bulk of their functionality. As we noted, the "bookseller tablets" (the Amazon Kindle Fires and the B&N Nooks), on the other hand, employ their own interfaces geared toward making purchases and consuming media (books, movies) from their own stores. Their stores also include a subset of Android apps available on Google Play. If you are wedded to one or the other online bookstores, and you're looking for a combined tablet/e-reader, the bookseller tablets are worth looking at. If you have no or only minor interest in consuming Amazon/B&N content, though, a general Android tablet or iPad Mini is a better pick.
PERFORMANCE. Our reviews explain the performance nitty-gritty for all of these tablets, but unless you're looking to play loads of demanding games, you won't see a huge real-world performance difference among the ones we've tested. The one exception: battery life. It's well worth comparing the battery results on our tests for any of the tablets you are considering. (We use a video-rundown test to put them all on a level playing field.)
CONNECTIVITY. This is the big price differentiator among tablets in a given product line. The cheapest models connect to the Net and app stores via Wi-Fi only, while premium models within a given line may offer cellular connectivity. The cellular models connect to a variety of networks, so examine the details, data limits, and pricing where you live before buying, and know that you're looking at a monthly fee for the service. Amazon's 2012 Kindle Fires offer particularly aggressive, low-cost wireless plans suitable for e-mail checking and other very light cellular duty.
PRICE. $199 is the new sweet spot for tablets of this size, thus our praise for the $199 Google Nexus 7, which Google, at press time, recently upped to 16GB of memory. (The original $199 Nexus 7 model had 8GB, and $249 now gets you a 32GB Nexus 7.) It's no coincidence that Amazon's 16GB HD version of its Kindle Fire is the same price, as is B&N's 8GB Nook HD. That said, $50 to $100 extra will typically get you more onboard storage, added features like an infrared transmitter that lets the tablet work as a home theater remote—see the Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0)—or even cellular connectivity. Here, again, the iPad Mini is the outlier, starting at $329 and climbling rapidly from there for more onboard storage or cellular connectivity.
See below for the latest and best 7-inch tablets we've tested. Note that we haven't yet gotten our hands on the brand-new B&N Nook HD, and our review of the Apple iPad Mini is still in the works. We will add these to the links below as we post our deep-dive reviews.
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