Deciding which tablet to buy nowadays is tougher than ever. There's the iPad, the Kindle Fire, the Galaxy Note 10.1, and of course the Google Nexus 7 among many others. If you've opted to purchase the Google Nexus 7 or are seriously considering it, here's come good news: the $200 tablet has some serious muscle underneath the hood.
A kernel released by developer clemsyn at XDA Developers allows you to overclock the Nexus 7's NVIDIA quad-core processor to a whopping 2.0GHz. The stock Nexus 7 runs at 1.3GHz.
The overclocked, superfast Nexus 7 shattered all other devices in a benchmark test, scoring an impressive 8,000 in the Quadrant benchmarks. The next closest device was the HTC One X smartphone, which scored a little over 4,500 in the same benchmarks.
Keep in mind though, that this overclocking kernel is still in development and is only available as an internal build. Running the Nexus 7 at such a high speed does make the device slightly warm, according to those who tested the kernel, and there are stability issues.
Clemsyn has released an earlier kernel which overclocks the Nexus 7 up to 1.8GHz, which you can find here.
The benchmark scores for the Nexus 7 prove just how much of a value Google's tablet is. Starting at $199 for the 8GB model and $249 for the 16GB model, the Nexus 7 is the first Android tablet to really shift focus away from Apple's iPad. It features a smaller 7-inch screen, a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera, and up to 10 hours of battery life for web browsing and e-reading. It also runs the latest version of Android, Jelly Bean.
Apple is expected to announce a smaller and cheaper iPad Mini on September 12. Do you think Apple's budget tablet will be more powerful than the Nexus 7?
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