It’s been five days since I began this challenge, which involves me leaving my laptop behind for a total of two entire weeks. And let me tell you, there’s been no shortage of impressive and depressing moments with this one.

To start off, let me say that the Nexus 7 is quite possibly the closest thing to a laptop besides an actual laptop. Even as I type this right now, I’m impressed with just how fast it’s been picking up my keystrokes and overall handling many things with speed and fluidity that has been expected with Jelly Bean. That being said, I have had to come up with some workarounds for the device, as many would expect, since it can’t do everything quite as cleanly as a good PC can.

For example: typing. In order to write on this thing, I had to buy a bluetooth keyboard. For those of you who thought I would be going without my utility belt, you thought wrong. I’ve purchased a Logitech Bluetooth Keyboard for Android 3.0+ from my local Best Buy. It cost about $70 but it was totally worth it. I can type on my Nexus 7 as fast as I can on my laptop now with this thing. That’s because this feels almost identical to any standard laptop or PC keyboard and is just as responsive as one would expect from such. If I didn’t have this thing, you wouldn’t be seeing any posts from me until the wrap-up at the end of this challenge. As good as the on-screen keyboard is, no touchscreen can beat a hardware keyboard for computing purposes.

Another issue I’ve encountered so far is within the web browser. As you guys probably know, Chrome is the default browser. That’s great because it’s the same browser I use on my laptop. All should be hunky dory right? Not quite. For some strange reason, if a site doesn’t have a “full site” link on the page itself, Chrome has not been loading the full version of the site. Yes, I do know about the “request desktop site” button; however, that just doesn’t seem to work on all occasions. Perhaps it’s a setting I could change, but up to this point, I’ve found nothing.

For many other purposes though, the 7 has been awesome. I’ve had no issue with any sort of social media. Perhaps it’s just me, but the Facebook app actually seems to work on this thing. Hopefully I didn’t just jinx myself but it seems to work like a quality app should, which is surprising given the history of the social network’s app.

I’ve also seen just how well this thing handles multitasking and graphics. I’ve run emulators and games alike on this bad boy and I can’t recall ever seeing a glitch or skip in the frame-rate. Games like Dead Trigger and more have run flawlessly. I’ve also installed an app called Super Video. Essentially, it works the same way as Pop-up Play does on the Galaxy S III, but it also works with YouTube and links on websites and such. Even when running a full VEVO music video in the background, the device flew through everything that I through at it. And is it just me, or is the speaker on this thing surprisingly good? Sound quality aside, this device hasn’t let me down.

One issue I’ve run into though, is rooting a device. I’m trying to find a way to root a device for a friend of mine and can obviously not get all the required software I need to do so from my Nexus 7. I’m not sure there is a workaround for this particular issue but I’ll continue searching just the same.

So almost a week into the challenge and the device has been impressive so far. Not perfect, but it has been a surprisingly good driver for almost all of my daily needs and that would cover most of everyone else’s as well I would presume.

Do you guys have any questions for me? If so, ask in the comments I’ll try to answer them in the next update. See you guys in a couple days!