Since the Nexus 7 got in the hands of multiple tech media outlets, we have seen numerous reviews posted. AnandTech for one however has made a discovery that you won’t see in many of these reviews. It has to do with the USB storage capabilities on the Nexus 7.
Google Nexus 7 doesn’t support USB storage
As AnandTech explains, they had a lot of emails asking whether USB-OTG for storage was already supported or whether it would be supported in the shipping software bundle. They asked a lot of people who are in the know and believe they’ve gotten a definitive answer:
USB-OTG is supported on the Nexus 7, but as anyone who’s ever used it knows, peripherals or devices work only depending on the host OS and the drivers. With the Nexus 7, using a keyboard and mouse is supported, and they saw Google using an Ethernet-to-MicroUSB adapter with the Nexus 7 as well. Sadly, mounting USB storage natively isn’t supported on the Nexus 7.
With any luck, rooted users will be able to use StickMount successfully with the Nexus 7. Additionally, MHL isn’t supported on the Nexus 7 either – this isn’t a surprise, as adding MHL would need another package, which would increase BOM cost.
So what this basically means is that if you decide to buy the cheaper 8GB Nexus 7 tablet, be prepared to live with that much space given that there is no microSD slot. Additionally, recent reports have found that there is actually only 5.92GB of useable space as the remainder is occupied by system files.
