7in tablet sales rocket despite the Google Nexus 7's flaws

According to DisplaySearch, a subsidiary of The NPD Group, the leading global provider of consumer and retail market research, sales of tablet panels reached 27 million in March this year. This represents an increase of 67% month over month and 48% of those 27m panels are 7in. That is a sizeable chunk of the tablet market and it shows how popular small, cheap tablets have become. Apple doesn't give a breakdown of sales figures, but there are rumours that the iPad Mini sells extremely well too. It seems that Steve Jobs was wrong about 9.7in tablets being the perfect size.

There are two reasons why 7in tablets (and the 8in iPad Mini) are so popular. The first is the price and there are many cheap Android tablets, such as the Google Nexus 7, Samsung Galaxy Tab 2, Amazon's Kindle Fire, plus numerous less well known brands competing for crumbs at the bottom end of the market. People do like bargains and tablets costing a fraction of Apple's iPad certainly look very tempting.

The second reason for the popularity of 7in tablets is that they are more portable and easier to hold. The iPad is a fantastic tablet with a great screen display and Microsoft's Surface is interesting, but for some tasks they are simply too big and heavy. A 7in tablet is more comfortable to hold and it is ideal for reading ebooks as it is roughly the same size as a printed book. People spend a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks and these are also fine in 7in format too. It isn't perfect for everything though and sometimes you do need a large screen, but mostly 7in is fine.

I have been using the Google Nexus 7 for around a year now and it has been a great tablet. To be honest, I've kind of been forced to use it because the rest of the family hog the iPad so much. Despite it having a nine-hour battery life, it often needs charging up every night. The thing is never off.

I'm mostly happy with my Nexus 7, but it does have some flaws that will hopefully be fixed in the next version. One flaw is the software buttons. A Samsung Galaxy S2/3/4 for example, has buttons at the bottom of the phone for Home, Back and Menu. The Google Nexus 7 puts these buttons on the screen. The screen is very tall and narrow at 1280 pixels high and 800 wide. It is fine in portrait mode because there is sufficient screen depth to give space over to the software buttons at the bottom.

In landscape mode however, there just isn't enough vertical space to dedicate to software buttons. Most apps display a black strip across the bottom of the screen that is simply wasted space - it contains the Home, Back and Menu buttons. Perhaps it was cheaper than putting in hardware buttons as Samsung does, but it is a bad idea. It is less of a problem on the Nexus 10 because the screen is bigger and the resolution is much greater.

Another flaw of the Nexus 7 is the lack of a back-facing camera. It would be so useful to be able to take photos and videos and it is a shame that Google skimped on this part. Apart from shooting photos and videos for fun, one of the things the iPad gets used for in my house is for creating eBay auctions. You can create a listing with the eBay app, shoot the photos, and upload everything. You just can't do that on the Nexus 7. It does have a camera, but it is on the front, so you have to point the screen away from you and you can't see what you are taking a photo of.

My next tablet is unlikely to be a 10in model and it will probably be a smaller one. What will yours be?