Why cheap ASUS Nexus tablets suck.

I have a Nexus 7 tablet. I bought this thing for about $200 after coupon codes, and I got exactly what I expected when I spent $200 to get a Tegra 3, 720p display, & 32 GB of storage; a buggy pile of shit.

I used it for months and it worked great, outside the occasion when touch input on the screen became impossible. When this happened I'd put it down and do something else. I'd be reading a book and it'd zoom in and out and turn pages for me, or mess me up when typing an email. Whatever. It's $200.

A new update comes out, and I get an alert. I decide to try it out to see what happens, and if it fixes the touchscreen bugs that hundreds of thousands of people are having.

It gets bricked. It restarts, with a bunch of colored balls moving around but never booting. I tried everything from wiping it, loading a new image via fastboot or adb from the bootloader menu, from the recovery, blah. It just doesn't fucking work. I have managed to unbrick my HTC One S, HTC Sensation 4G, Samsung Galaxy S 4G, but this is just dead. Transfer hangs up and dies halfway through every file I push to it.

I look online for some help. The little included manual says "For online help & support, visit support.google.com/nexus" Google only supports it if you purchased it through their store. Since I bought this from NewEgg, more than 30 days ago, my only option is support through ASUS.

I decide to RMA it to ASUS. I paid for the warranty, might as well use it, right? I'm tired of fixing shit when I come home. I do this fucking crap 12 hours a day, the last thing I want to do is repair my  tablet when it's still in warranty. Who knows, I may get one with a touchscreen that doesn't suck.

This is where the cheapness and shittiness of ASUS comes into play. I went to check the warranty card. It has pages of fine print on what they don't cover, with no information on how to actually RMA this piece of shit. We finally get to a section with a webpage, and their Taiwan office address. I was hoping for a phone number, but no such luck.

I visited the webpage on the warranty card. Here's what happens when I input the serial number of the tablet into ASUS' support website.

This is what I get when I put my serial number into ASUS' support page.

I figured maybe I put the wrong number in. There's a little link that says How to identify Serial Number? Click it, I dare you.. you get this.

This is what you get when you click the link that says "How to identify Serial Number?" on ASUS' support website.

I decided, fuck this, let me search manually. So I get to a page that looks like this.

Yes, it's actually asking me to call a support hotline, while not providing the number to this hotline in either the manual, the warranty booklet, or the support page itself.

I navigated to another point of the site and decided to sign up for an account. I signed up, and went back to the Nexus 7 page, to register my tablet. I clicked to register my tablet with ASUS only to get taken to this screen.

a) I already registered an account and am logged in.

b) It is stuck, and won't even show a dialog box unless you use internet explorer.

Here I am trying to register the tablet. It asks me to register on the site even though I already logged in and also freezes unless I use Internet Explorer.

At this point I feel like I'm being trolled. This is intentional. ASUS does not want anyone sending this thing back.

I can't complain too much. Again, I paid $200 for this. I earned my misery when I decided I was going to buy something this powerful that was this cheap, but this is bad enough that it's comical, and worth sharing in detail.

Did I mention the login page for their website only works in Internet Explorer? ASUS is never prying a dime out of my wallet again.

As cool as the decreasing price of technology is, be very wary about competition driving prices too far down. This is really sad, because ASUS/Google killed the 7" Android tablet market. No one is going to innovate in this space because no one wants to compete spec-wise with a tegra 3 and 720p display for $200. At the same time, no company providing all of this for $200 is making any money, and if a company doesn't make money off of you, they can't care about you. They can't support the product. The result is this.. crap.

As much as I like to smash on Apple products sometimes, Apple's entire customer experience kills ASUS's by a large margin. There is no comparison.