Google Nexus 7 Teardown

Kudos to the folks at iFixit for a beautiful and informative teardown of the new Google Nexus 7 tablet. We have some of the content here. All images except the one just below are courtesy of iFixit.

The Nexus 7 is manufactured by Asus and earns some immediate praise from iFixit for a reason near and dear to them: It's repairable, much more so than some new devices from Apple. According to iFixit, "Asus used retaining clips to hold the case together, not glue. Opening up the Nexus 7 requires a couple of minutes and some plastic opening tools."

It only scores 7 out of 10 in repairability for them; for instance, the glass and LCD are fused together, so if one breaks you have to replace both. Overall it's very easy to disassemble and reassemble.

In terms of repairability, the Nexus 7 is close to the Amazon Kindle Fire, the device against which it is paired in the market.

Some highlights from iFixit:

• Though the back cover's dark and light layers remind us of something a Stormtrooper would have in his arsenal, it houses the GPS, NFC, and Wi-Fi antennas -- all manufactured between April 20 and May 25th of this year.
• The Nexus 7 has a 4326 mAh, 16 Wh battery that can last 9:49 hours. The Kindle Fire, by comparison, has a 4400 mAh, 16.28 Wh battery -- but only lasts 7:42 hours. Go figure.
• For further comparison, this battery time falls right in between the batteries found in the 2012 iPad models, which last 9:52 hours for HSPA and 9:37 hours for LTE... Except that the iPad 3 batteries are *significantly larger* at 11500 mAh, 42.5 Wh.

Click here to see the 7 coolest features in the Nexus 7 tablet.