I don't like how 7" tablets render webpages. It's not really the fault of Google or the Nexus 7 team; the problem is that most sites at the moment don't do a good job of serving of pages for mobile devices. This will change over time, as more sites clue in and use responsive design and HTML 5 to render pages. But for now, I virtually never bother to open Chrome on my Nexus 7 because most websites look terrible, so I do all my web surfing on my desktop.

However, all is not lost. I'd suggest you use some combination of Flipboard, Instapaper, and an RSS reader like Google Reader. Each of these apps will extract the text of a website's page, and reformat it for nice display on your Nexus 7. You'll have beautifully formatted text of whatever you want to read.

I think iPads still have the best RSS readers, so I personally use Mr. Reader on my iPad and Instapaper on my Nexus 7. There's a nice version of Flipboard available from the Google Play Store.

Nobody's answered this in this thread, but my OTG adapter still hasn't arrived, and I still need to know if you can use this an OTG adapter to hook up a USB keyboard.

I already have a regular female USB to male micro USB adapter that works fine for this purpose, but I suspect there's no reason to get this sort of adapter when an OTG adapter does the same thing and also supports access to thumb drives in rooted Nexus 7 devices. Am I correct in this assumption?

I did a bit more digging in regard to my first question and discovered that not all female usb to male micro USB adapters are OTG. So I just bought an OTG version of this adapter.

One remaining question: I assume that in addition to being able to hook up thumb drives or cameras, this adapter can do everything a non-OTG adapter can do. In other words, I could use this OTG adapter to hook up a USB keyboard. Am I correct on this matter?

I expect a lot of us are going to want to use our Nexus 7s in the car for navigation or listening to audio. Does anyone know of a suction mount that would work with our units?

Drew, have you managed to transfer photos from a camera to the Nexus 7? I have the necessary USB adapters but I don't see any way to get the Nexus 7 to recognize my camera. I'm thinking the same restrictions against the Nexus 7 accessing thumb drives and flash storage apply here. But please let me know if I'm mistaken, if this task can in fact be accomplished through an unrooted Nexus 7.

Thanks, @Samalex. I've written a bunch of 86/286/386 clone PC manuals after I finished college. And I briefly was a contract tech writer at Apple for a Hypercard-type programming environment that never shipped. I've spent most of my career writing books about animal agribusiness and vegetarianism, and I publish Vegan.com.

I've owned an iPad for the past couple of years but there was something about the Nexus 7 that really appealed to me. It's going to take me a long time to gain the skill-set to understand its more esoteric features, but it looked to me like nobody was writing much about it for the newbie audience. I doubt many people on this site would want a book as basic as the one I'm writing. It's more a book for your mothers and fathers who've never owned a tablet, and who think that the cloud is where birds Twitter.

I hope this doesn't come off as trolling. I'd love to see a spirited discussion on this point, as I think it would be really valuable.

Is there anyone here who DOESN'T view the home screens and the widget screens as fundamentally broken, and both hard to navigate and understand? Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't get it. Overall, I'm so impressed by my Nexus 7. But the all-important main Home screen strikes me as an absolute train wreck— like if I threw a few books and DVDs I own on my floor.

But maybe I just haven't figured out the subtleties of using these screens. I've dragged widgets to the home screen's secondary pages and I don't see the point of doing that either. What I want to do is modify the default first home screen to contain all the apps I generally use, instead of being senselessly dominated by a bunch of images from my media library.

Maybe I'm just imposing my iPad-centric biases here, but it seems that where the home screen is concerned Apple got things right, and Google's current implementation is clunky and ill-conceived. I've realized that the Nexus 7's Home Screen's dock is super flexible and useful, but the rest of the Home Screen makes no sense to me at all. What I'd like is for the primary home screen page to offer up a collection of my favorites folders and apps. And while realize I can dump widgets for some of these on secondary pages, there doesn't seem to be any point do doing so.

So here's how I use the Home screen right now. I've carefully thought through what I want in my dock, and I've got folders there for my games and productivity apps. I view the remaining 80% of my primary home screen as an ugly, cluttered waste of space (images for my Google books, music, and videos). If what I want isn't in my dock I hit the Apps screen button in the center of the dock and choose what I need from that screen.

Am I doing this right? Or am I missing a way to create a more elegant and useful functionality? If I'm missing something, it's sure not obvious. In whatever version of Android comes after Jelly Bean, there's nothing I'd like more than for Google to completely redesign the Home screen.

Eager to hear what our community thinks.

Hey All,

I'll be releasing a book on the Nexus 7 by mid-August. I've been diving pretty deeply into using my Nexus 7, and so far I'm incredibly impressed by all that $199 gets you.

I decided it would make sense to come here and participate as much as I can on these forums.  **edited by admin**


I'm looking forward to participating in this forum and making some new friends.

-Erik