Nexus 7 (2012) with latest Google software (it auto-updates) is solid. They had some TRIM I/O problems with earlier Android that made performance degrade a lot over time… like… a lot a lot. But with the latest Android installed it’s much better.
The Surface 1 is the exact same hardware as the Nexus 7 you have under the hood – Tegra 3. Kind of anemic for Windows 8, honestly, perf was never great even at launch and now it’s really pokey.
However. It has an SD card slot on the back, so you can drop in a 64GB SD XC card in there no problem, then it becomes a pretty nice media playback tablet, about the same size and weight as an iPad 4, nice screen, and most importantly you can easily copy large media files over to it – even via USB!
