It appears that I jumped the gun a little earlier when posting about the great customer service at Google for Nexus products. Nexus 7 tablet’s failure has been epic. $199 starting price coupled with what could be an excellent product seems almost to good to be true. Perusing the forums shows up with some wonderful user experiences with the Nexus 7. Yet, a large portion of unknown size seems to be having some very annoying hardware issues with little or no support from the Google Nexus 7 team. The horrible treatment by the Nexus 7 customer service appears to be even worse for those living out of the country.
For those of you that do not know, the Nexus 7 is a Google released Asus made 7” Android tablet priced beginning at $199 for 8 gigs. Mine was $250 since I bought it with the extra internal storage. At first I was a little under whelmed by the size after coming from a 10” tablet. However, very shortly after some initial use I found the 7” size to be optimal for me. The Nexus was a more convenient size to carry around and just about the physical size of an average paper book. I was equally afraid that movie watching might suffer, but even that turned out to be pretty perfect at least from a screen size standpoint.
Sadly the screen is the focal point of the failure. Notice I did not say epic failure as that is to come. Right off the bat the screen was obviously having problems. When I power it up, especially after not using it for a few minutes, the LCD is almost entirely whited out. As I use the Nexus it progressively gets brighter until finally showing its’ full color and brightness. But this usually takes up to ten or more minutes just to get there. How do they expect a user to deal with this?
I then started to notice what looks like little rips in the corners under the glass. It appears to be screen separation at each of the four corners just a few millimeters in length. The tears are just enough to constantly notice it.
The next issue is the flicker. Getting random lines flickering during reading or movie watching is quite annoying. The flickering seems to be spontaneous expect that I might not have been able to pin down the exact cause.
The worst of the physical issues is the temporary burn in or ghosting of images on the screen. So I surf the net and the last page I am on is the Google search page. I jump over to the Netflix app and all I can see is a faded Google logo and search bar shining through my red Netflix load screen. This gets old fast as it can take a long time before this ever goes away. It is enough to make me put the device down.
If you remember I said there was an epic level failure. Well that would have to be Google itself. I called the Nexus customer service hotline and got right through. Unlike many reports from other customers on line, I was able to get a service person very quickly on a Saturday night at that. He went into detail with me about the issues with my tablet. His first response was that this was an immediate warranty issue and he was sending one right out. I offered a credit card to help confirm and he said it was not needed. He said it would arrive in a couple of days with a return prepaid shipping label to send back the defective Nexus 7. This was just about the best customer service I have ever experienced from a tech company so I thought. I even left a raving Blog post and answered the customer survey. But then it ended up all being false so I guess it was not that great.
A week passed and I was wondering what was up. So I called again and got through quickly once more. This different Google rep then told me that the last person I spoke with did not have the power to warranty my item and that this rep could not either. He said that all he could do was label my issue “escalated” in their system. He said he would have transferred me over to the people that could warranty my Nexus 7, but Google’s systems were down. Now I am sitting here being told that I should just try to call again in a few days. It has been a week without anything and now I am out of the 15 day window. What the crap Google?
This device is really awesome and at such a great price point. They say you get what you pay for, but I did not pay for a broken tablet. Sure, a sub $200 tablet is expected to have some limitations, but I did not even get to find out what those are. I just got a broken one.
Maybe with your help this message will get out to Google or even to Asus. I want to hear from someone that can actually replace my Nexus 7. I do not want a refund, I want a functioning Nexus. That is it. I will gladly do another review if things ever improve.
All you awesome KDtech youtube subscribers and KDtech blog reader could do me and what appears to be many troubled Nexus owners a favor, hit that like button on the video (when I post it) and blog, help share the video, and subscribe to my channel so you can hear what happens. It is all free and will help protect you and everyone else from future crappy customer experiences. Or at least it may make me feel a little better...
Thanks for watching and all your support. You can follow me on twitter @kraisydave, my website at KDtech.co and Google + @kraisy dave. Have a good one.
Written by: kraisydave
Everyone deserves to get the most out of their device. - KDtech.co
