Review: Google Nexus 10

Google and Samsung have teamed up to create the new Nexus 10 tablet. Play with it for a few minutes and it becomes obvious the two companies have exercised their many powers to get everything right.

The new device is very, very fast. It has the highest resolution display of any 10-incher on the market. The styling is restrained, but attractive. The case is lightweight and thin. The camera and the front-facing speakers are solid. The user interface is mature and polished, and the Nexus 10 provides the most pleasant experience I've ever seen on a big-screen Android tablet.

But, unfortunately, the same dark cloud hovering over all larger Android tablets also pains the Nexus 10: a lack of apps. There simply aren't enough tablet-specific apps available on Android, and no matter how swift or shiny or sexy your hardware is, that really stings. It's the apps that make the tablet.

The same dark cloud hovering over all larger Android tablets also pains the Nexus 10: a lack of apps.Apple's iPad, which on paper is outmatched by the Nexus 10 in nearly every way, is still a more compelling product because it has 275,000 iPad-specific apps sitting in Apple's App Store just waiting to be downloaded, touched, tapped and swiped.

It makes the Nexus 10's primary mission – jump-starting Android's 10-inch tablet ecosystem – seem all the more daunting. While there are more than 700,000 apps built for Android, most of them were built with phones – not tablets – in mind. Google has been diven to publicly pleading with developers to build the tablet-optimized apps everyone with a Transformer Pad or Galaxy tablet has been dreaming about.

The Nexus 7, Google's phenomenal 7-inch device, has set a high bar for the Nexus 10. Asus has already sold millions of units and is expecting to see monthly sales top 1 million. While it faces the same lack-of-tablet-app problem as the Nexus 10, its $200 price tag, gorgeous display and monstrous power make it a more compelling buy. Also consider the Nexus 7's diminutive size, which not only makes it better for using with one hand, reading, and for keeping nearby at all times, but also makes using stretched-out phone apps less painful. But on a 10-inch tablet, stretched phone apps are non-starters, and the software drought is much tougher to ignore.

There are dozens of examples of why this is a problem, but just take a look at Twitter. On the iPad, it's beautiful. A series of sliding panels display tweets, user profiles and trending topics. On the Nexus 10 (and any Android tablet for that matter), you get a stretched-out phone app with tons of wasted white space. Text is small and tough to read, and the overall user experience can generously be described as unimpressive.

Google knows how to make compelling tablet apps. Look at the Google+ app on both the iPad and any Android tablet. It's a superior experience, with large, high-resolution photos and slick side-scrolling navigation that feels more like an interactive magazine than a regular old social network. It's a beacon to the developer world: This Is What's Possible.

If consumers buy the Nexus 10 in droves, developers will have clear incentive to make more tablet-tailored Android apps. If more exciting apps are made, more consumers will buy large Android tablets. Chicken, meet egg.

It's a huge challenge, but the Nexus 10 is a device well-equipped for this particular battle. People are only going to spend $400 on this thing if the hardware is excellent, and I want to try to convey to you exactly how excellent the hardware is.

Let's start with the beautiful display. Up close and at arm's length, it looks just as good as the third- and fourth-generation iPad's 2048 x 1536 Retina display. The resolution of the Nexus 10 is actually higher – 2560 x 1600 across 10.055-inches – though the two display resolutions appear identical to the naked eye. Nothing looks bad on the Nexus 10. Colors are bright and vibrant. Detail is plentiful, and text rivals the printed page. Movies, photos, web pages, books, magazines and particularly games – everything looks outstanding.

The tablet is screaming fast, too. Power comes from Samsung's 1.7GHz Exynos 5 dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM. It arrives with 16GB or 32GB on board, but while there is USB, there is no expandable microSD storage.

Also see our review of the Google Nexus 4 Android smartphone.

Battery life is great. In my week-long test, I usually had to charge up by the middle of every other day. Like the Nexus 4 smartphone, the Nexus 10 has an LED notification light sitting just below the touchscreen, alerting you to new e-mails, interactions and such. It's a useful touch I'd like to see on more tablets. Ports are sparse, with microUSB on the left and microHDMI on the right. NFC is built into the front and rear of the Nexus 10, which should make sharing files between the tablet and a mobile handset as easy as a tap. Front-facing speakers to the left and right of the display sound better than most of the tinny built-ins on other tablets, but nothing beats a good pair of headphones.

Above the display on the front is a 1.9-megapixel camera that can shoot up to 720p video. It's great for video chatting, but it's not very good for anything else. Thankfully, there's a 5-megapixel/1080p camera, paired with an LED flash, on the back. The rear camera is about as good as the cameras they were putting in smartphones about two years ago – it works perfectly fine, but it won't wow you. Sure, you may feel a bit awkward shooting a photo with such a large device, but with features such as Photo Sphere – which allows you to shoot a 360-degree panorama and then share it on Google+ or even Google Maps – you may find yourself getting over it. I know I did.

Like all other large Android tablets, the Nexus 10 was designed with a landscape orientation in mind – though it does rotate to portrait, too. As soon as you boot up the Nexus 10, you're greeted by a large My Library widget that displays any content you've purchased from the Google Play online storefront – books, magazines, music, TV shows and movies. If you tap on any item displayed, the widget will launch its corresponding app: Play Music, Play Books, Play Magazines or Play Movies & TV. You can also use the widgets to dive into the Google Play store and buy more content. If you're not into the widgets, you can easily remove them from your homepage.

It's a simple trick to make the Nexus 10 feel like more fun than other larger 10-inch tablets ("Look at all the stuff you can watch!") and it works really well here, just as well as it did on the Nexus 7 where Google first tried this approach. And watching stuff on it is quite pleasant. The back and sides are coated in a grippy, rubberized polymer that makes the device easier to hold with one hand. (Though this is a Samsung device, it doesn't have any of the glossy, cheap-feeling plastic of other Samsung tablets.) The Nexus 10 is also slightly wedge-shaped; it's thinner at its bottom than its top. Despite the slope, the 1.33-pound weight doesn't feel unbalanced. The result is a big tablet that is easier to hold for longer periods of time.

The Nexus 10 runs on Android 4.2 and, like other Nexus devices, this tablet will receive its over-the-air updates directly from Google, with none of the delays imposed by hardware companies. On November 13, the Nexus 10's ship date, Google plans to push an update that will allow multiple user profiles on the Nexus 10.

I haven't gotten a chance to try this out, though some Google employees have demoed the feature for me and it makes perfect sense. More so than phones, tablets are shared among two or more people in a household, and user switching would enable each person to jump in and see his or her own Google data, e-mail, apps and entertainment purchases all synced up, without having to futz with the Google accounts of family members. That will be a welcome addition.

So here you have a tablet that looks like every other tablet – yet another black rectangle. And yet, the pure Android 4.2 software (which is the best all-around Android experience out there) combined with the stellar internals and the awesome screen make it vastly better than any other big Android tablet before it. It's clearly the best 10-inch Android tablet you can buy right now. If only we had some apps to spice it up.

WIRED Gorgeous display is among the best on any tablet. Samsung's Exynos processor and 2GB of RAM kick out beastly levels of performance. The 5-megapixel rear camera is good, and features like Photo Sphere make it better. Android shows up as Google intended, with no alterations. Timely software updates, straight from Mountain View. Grippy coating and a thin, light profile make it easy to hold with one hand.

TIRED The same big problem that every Android tablet has – there still aren't enough tablet-tailored apps available in Google Play. No microSD card slot. Safe, reserved styling doesn't feel as unique as other Nexus products.