Consumers who purchased the 16 GB version of Google's Nexus 7 tablet are complaining of severe performance issues.

Not to get personal, but I thought it was just me. When I first received the Google Nexus 7 tablet, it was simply badass, even more so compared to my Kindle Fire (which was tossed over to my wife). But since then, the tablet's performance has glaringly slowed to a crawl, turning into a disappointing, worthless piece of junk. That may be harsh, but the before and after is like night and day, and as a consumer who shelled out $250 for the 16 GB version, I expect a quality product.

It seems that my Nexus 7 tablet no longer has spunk.

Mind you I'm horribly obsessive about performance. Just like on the PC, I make sure nothing is running in the background that will steal a single frame from my games. Android is no different, and while I like the way Ice Cream Sandwich will allow applications to run simultaneously in the background, I make sure they're all nuked so I can get every drop of juice from Nvidia's quad core Tegra 3.

But now it seems that I'm not the only one who's noticed the performance degradation. The Register has an interesting article that describes the same problem, only the information is based on various forums where annoyed customers have flocked to provide their complaints. Apparently the problem exists only on the 16 GB model, and when the storage capacity falls below 2 GB.

Technically device owners only have 13 GB of internal storage to use the rest is eaten up by Android. Unlike many Android smartphones, that 13 GB is reserved for apps, their data, multimedia and so on. Unfortunately, 13 GB isn't really enough for the Android gamer, especially when playing Gameloft titles. As an example, N.O.V.A. 3 eats up 1.99 GB, whereas Modern Combat 3 eats up 1.47 GB. Order and Chaos, Gameloft's World of Warcraft mobile knock-off, consumes 0.92 GB. With just those three Gameloft games alone, I've lost 4.38 GB.

"So here I am, stuck with a device that is labeled for 16 GB storage, that in reality only has just over 13 GB of storage ... but due to performance issues, REALLY only has 9-10 GB of storage available for content and software," writes one angry Nexus 7 owner.

"Ever since I got my Nexus 7 I noticed it was a little on the slow side, when playing 3D games I experienced a lot of freezing and issues when it was loading in new textures but more recently I've noticed these issues get worse," writes another owner. "Downloading an app is tremendously slow with it taking several minutes to download just a few meg while my phone completes the same task in seconds."

"I've seen reports of this linked with poor IO transfer benchmarks," another owner writes who saw a performance increase after disabling Currents and freeing up 2 GB of cache. "Current best guess seems to be that the device is having trouble writing and reading cache during background tasks and is slowing down everything else. Thing is it ran like a particularly greased up Usain Bolt for the first few months. I was sure it was some sort of app I'd installed messing things up but I can't isolate it at all, and it manifests as high IO usage. It really is incredibly annoying, with Chrome habitually showing the "Not Responding" dialogue, and Google Now becoming Google Eventually."

For the record, AndroBench produced these results on my Nexus 7:

Go here to see the original:
16GB Nexus 7 Can't Perform With Storage Nearly Full?