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Originally Posted by tacitus
A lot of interesting discussion on what the Nexus 7 has and should have had on this thread, and it's good to see that most people understand the difference between features that they wanted--for their needs--and those that most people won't miss.
Like most of you, I would have liked to have seen an SD card slot and an HDMI cable, but I fully understand why Google decided not to include them. I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of the millions of Kindle Fire owners haven't come close to filling up their 8GB of storage, and that's the market Google is gunning for with the Nexus 7. (I haven't even used up 3GB on my Nook Color yet, and I've had it for several months.) And it's not true that you can just slap on an extra $20 to include the extra ports. Consumer products at this end of the market are extremely price sensitive, and $20 can mean the difference between success and failure, no matter how good, technically, your product is.
From the reviews that are already out, it's clear why Google chose to spend money of a better display and quality build rather than extra features. Reviewers have all said how nice -- and how much better -- the experience of using the Nexus is compared with the Fire. An SD-card slot, on the other hand, would have gotten a one line bullet point, at most.
I saw one comment saying that the lack of an SD card slot is so 2009. Actually, it's not. In many ways, streaming has already begun to supersede local storage. A few years ago, my nephews and nieces used to carry around hundreds of gigabytes-worth of music files with them. These days, not so much. Most of them are quite content to use streaming services along with cloud storage storing the few tracks they end up buying.
The same is becoming true with videos too. Only the most dedicated of collectors (or pirates) rips and stores terabytes of videos locally these days. The rest are quite content to use Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Google, etc. to stream the stuff they watch. And given that's the type of thing Google is looking to encourage (the more people use the cloud, the better for them), it only makes sense that they don't want to buck the trend.
Of course, ideally the Nexus 7 would be all things to all people, but given the aggressive pricing Google was shooting for, it's not at all surprising that they would leave out the features that the vast majority of users won't even know they are missing.
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The cloud is not much good when you are out of WiFi range. If you are at home with your WiFi running, just belly up to your 26" monitor or to your 40plus" TV.
Only in a restaurant is a cloud of much use and I personally have long had Web Storage as have many internet wise folks.