Nexus 7 as a laptop?

Tue, 17 Jun 2014 12:11:31 +0000

Over the last couple of years, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of my Nexus 7. Recently I wanted to do more writing on it, so I picked up a cheap BlueTooth keyboard from Anker and yes, I know it’s chunky, but it’s very decent to type on, and gets a lot from its two AA batteries.

This made it much more usable as an input system, but somehow I now wanted to use a mouse as a pointer instead of leaning in to touch the screen from the keyboard sit-back position, and then I remembered I bought a USB OTG cable a while back to play with USB stick file systems on a rooted system. On a normal Nexus 7, you can’t use it for bulk storage, but it does work for a mouse, even an old Microsoft mouse you bought a decade ago in a bargain basement in Akiba.

The Android system is surprisingly navigable from a keyboard, and the mouse makes it pretty much like a laptop, albeit with limited right-click. Yes, I know I’ve negated much of the point of having a tablet over a laptop, but this was a cheap conversion, and I only need to take the parts I want.

The main benefit may be that it enhances the typing capability, so for email, writing, website work and such it’s pretty good. You obviously don’t need the mouse, and just default to the touchscreen. Either way, it’s an option.

Nexus on Nanikore

Nexus 7 as a laptop?