Semi-OT: Newer N7, no pogo pins..?

[sampoodle]

Just curious: I casually looked at a the current Nexus7 in store: no pogo pins?

Any provision for a dock?

As someone who loves my N7 (2012) dock, i have good reasons to wonder..!

 

[B. Diddy]

No pogo pins, no dock like the one for the 2012 N7. I would guess that there wasn't enough demand for Google to have this feature in the 2013 version. Or they figured the wireless charging trumped the pogo pin charging.

 

[MalachyNG]

No pogo pins, no dock like the one for the 2012 N7. I would guess that there wasn't enough demand for Google to have this feature in the 2013 version. Or they figured the wireless charging trumped the pogo pin charging.

I think I agree with the wireless charging being the reason. The POGO dock really only offered charging and a headphone jack. It didn't offer a desktop mode or data transfer ability. Docks were standard in phones up until around 2011 and then when Motorola's atrix and droid lines didn't make headway with their webtop there were fewer and fewer dock-related accessories.

The Galaxy Nexus had pogo pins and a couple of half-hearted accessories but 3rd party vendors didn't do anything with them (same with the 2012 Nexus 7). The Nexus 10 had pogo pins but I don't believe google has done anything with them beyond that weird little charging attachment samsung was selling. However, the Nexus 4 didn't have pogo pins and neither has the 2013 nexus 7 or the Nexus 5.

I think google would do well to bake some type of car mode, desktop mode, alarm clock mode into the NFC chip and sell branded wireless chargers for each need with the charging coils and also a little nfc tag to have the device enter the specific mode. Having some type of easily activated mode by NFC would really jumpstart 3rd party accessories for android phones (and the nexus line) and maybe even NFC. It seems like a lot of development is going into location and context aware task switching (a la tasker/google now) but even now if I tell llama (like tasker) to enable 'car mode' there is no car mode on my nexus device for it to enable.