Welcome to the Nexus 7 Forum Brady!

During Google's I/O conference last week where the Nexus 7 and Android 4.1 were both introduced, we got a brief look at the new voice activated search 'assistant' in Jelly Bean which many have compared to Apple's 'Siri'.  While I was impressed during the demo at the conference the above video by Android Community's Cory Gunther really blew me away.   

There's no doubt that Google's 'Assistant' sounds much more human than Apple's 'Siri' and the ability to understand relatively rapid speech with little or no errors is also impressive.   Now obviously this is a technology that is continuing to evolve rapidly and as Google improves the technology we can expect more and more Artificial Intelligence features to make its way into the new 'Assistant'...which since I can't find any other name given to her I've chosen to name 'Gabby'.     What do you think? Is gonna be a fun feature to play around with or what?  Seems to blow 'Siri' out of the water, no?

Note: (While Cory calls this 'Google Now' in the video, that is actually a different feature that I will go into in a future article. This video is the voice actuated search 'assistant')


Source: androidcommunity

I stand corrected!  I haven't had any virus/malware issues in Android but apparently there is 'some' risk so we'll just keep an eye on it.   Something for us to further discuss once we get our Nexus 7s in our hands!

Samalex (Sam) has graciously offered to help with some of the moderation in the forum.  He'll be helping me keep posts and topics in the right place, deleting spam, answering questions and generally helping to grow and improve the forum so it'll be a great resource for all of us Nexus 7 owners.   Feel free to let either of us know if you have any suggestions for articles, topics, new boards or anything else you'd like to see at Nexus7Forum.com and Thanks for your help Samalex!

BFM (Rob)

I'm sure Live Wallpapers should work perfectly fine on Jelly Bean just like they do with Ice Cream Sandwich.  Don't see any reason why they wouldn't. 

Do you plan on rooting your Nexus 7? Do you plan on sticking with the 'out of the box' OS with no changes?  Perhaps you're curious about rooting but just don't know enough about it or feel confident or 'tech savvy' enough to do it yourself?  Let us know your thoughts.  We're curious what percentage of forum members plan on rooting compared to those that will stick with the stock Nexus 7 as it comes from the factory.

One of the things that struck some as a bit odd at first when they introduced the Nexus 7 last week at Google I/O was that Google chose to use the portrait orientation 'phone' UI vs. the landscape 'Tablet' UI as the default setup for their 7 inch tablet.   In fact Google went so far as to prevent the home screen from rotating when the tablet is turned on its side which basically forces you to use it in portrait mode for functions on this home screen.  Many have since surmised that Google did this mainly because it was targeting a consumer audience that would use the Nexus 7 more in the easy to 'hold with one hand' 'portrait' orientation.

But what if you're more 'tablet savvy' and you prefer the landscape 'tablet' UI more like the one you see on Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich 10 inch tablets?  Well XDA-Developers Member SladeNoctis discovered that this was entirely possible if you changed the LCD density property in the build.prop file.  This moves the notification bar from the top of the screen to the lower right corner and tweaks the layout of the home screen and navigation toolbar as well. Now in the future as Google implements 'Jelly Bean' in more tablet devices they might put an option in the settings that would give users the ability to do this without rooting their devices and changing any code.  However for now you'll have to have a rooted Nexus 7 to make this change. 

Luckily, rooting your Nexus 7 is fairly easy to root.  You can then follow SladeNoctis' Instructions and presto!  You'll have a landscape home screen for your device.  Now there are some caveats to doing this.  First off while almost everything works fine in this mode it appears that Google is still tweaking some of the graphic elements and thus you'll see some slight anomalies like some text and pictures looking smaller and some apps 'might' look a little off and not be optimized for this orientation yet.  In time we expect these issues to be corrected though and they shouldn't interfere with the tablet's normal use.

So what do you think?  Will you want to root your Nexus 7 and make the changes to use your Nexus 7 in landscape 'tablet' mode?   Let us know your thoughts in the comments.   I've pasted some examples of the 'tablet' and 'portrait' versions of the same screen so you can see the difference more easily below.