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What do I need for storage?

Not the cheapest solution, but you could use the Kingston 16/32/64gb Wi-Drive or the Seagate 500gb drive that has Wi-Fi direct capabilities.

These drives can establish a direct connection to the Nexus. You can move files between your device and the drive and these drives can stream media to multiple devices at once.
 
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Not the cheapest solution, but you could use the Kingston 16/32/64gb Wi-Drive or the Seagate 500gb drive that has Wi-Fi direct capabilities.

These drives can establish a direct connection to the Nexus. You can move files between your device and the drive and these drives can stream media to multiple devices at once.

I do like the idea of those, but when I had a look at the prices it seems like you're nearly paying the full price of the N7 again for one. Using a cable might be more awkward, but it's certainly a lot cheaper.
 
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I do like the idea of those, but when I had a look at the prices it seems like you're nearly paying the full price of the N7 again for one. Using a cable might be more awkward, but it's certainly a lot cheaper.

The internal storage should be enough to get around on a day-to-day basis, but for plane rides I need the external storage. On planes however, having a dangling usb on the little desk wouldnt be too big of an issue. I already use an external harddrive to hold all of my media anyways
 
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Is it possible to connect say... to an old smartphone with SD storage without data or wifi wirelessly?

I can't say for sure, but theoretically I think you could. You would probably need to trigger the sdcard mounting yourself - it may not auto-detect like when you plug it into a PC - but once you've done that I don't see why it wouldn't work. Triggering it yourself may be easier said than done though, especially if you're not rooted.
 
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Are you 100% sure it needs to be rooted in order to have this capability to read from a flash USB drive? I've never rooted anything and it sounds...complicated. :/

At the moment, yes. It may be possible without rooting, at some point down the line when more developers can play around with it, but that's not guaranteed.

Rooting isn't for everyone, but if you want to give it a go there will be plenty of people in the All Things Root section there to guide you. Plus, we already have a one-click tool for rooting. You need to install a thing or two onto your PC to get the PC and the tablet communicating via USB, but the actual process of rooting won't be difficult. Nexus devices are always the simplest devices to root.
 
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Are you 100% sure it needs to be rooted in order to have this capability to read from a flash USB drive? I've never rooted anything and it sounds...complicated. :/

I'm not 100% sure what the latest method is. I know last week yes. You needed to use StickMount and you need to be rooted to use it.

People are rapidly making rooting the N7 much easier if you decide to. Plus you'll have 10,000 years of rooting experience in this forum for help.
 
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Look what I found - Maybe I could use an old android phone with ICS and use Wi-Fi Direct to transfer files:
Wi-Fi Direct Service Discovery

Ice Cream Sandwich introduced support for Wi-Fi Direct, a technology that lets apps discover and pair directly, over a high-bandwidth peer-to-peer connection. Wi-Fi Direct is an ideal way to share media, photos, files and other types of data and sessions, even where there is no cell network or Wi-Fi available.

With Jelly Bean, Android takes Wi-Fi Direct further, adding API support for pre-associated service discovery. Pre-associated service discovery lets your apps get more useful information from nearby devices about the services they support, before they attempt to connect. Apps can initiate discovery for a specific service and filter the list of discovered devices to those that actually support the target service or application.

For example, this means that your app could discover only devices that are “printers” or that have a specific game available, instead of discovering all nearby Wi-Fi Direct devices. On the other hand, your app can advertise the service it provides to other devices, which can discover it and then negotiate a connection. This greatly simplifies discovery and pairing for users and lets apps take advantage of Wi-Fi Direct more effectively.

With Wi-Fi Direct service discovery, you can create apps and multiplayer games that can share photos, videos, gameplay, scores, or almost anything else — all without requiring any Internet or mobile network. Your users can connect using only a direct p2p connection, which avoids using mobile bandwidth.

This info is on the Jelly Bean release notes website.
 
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I'm in the same boat as CrackBaby. I've never rooted. I'm not completely green on all things tech, but when it comes to rooting, I'm totally new. If this is something that will need to be done in order to have MicroSD storage connected, then I guess I'll have to suck it up and jump in.

Kind of like building a desktop tower for the first time, I guess.
 
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I wonder if the total cost of people that might mess their N7s up trying to root and return them will be greater than the cost of adding the feature in the first place.

Not talking about an sd slot, but setting full host support and permissions, out of box.

I appreciate the real reason is probably to force users into the cloud, but the common N7 discussion topic even at Gamestop is the external storage issue.

As a result and the likely huge sales, this device will probably have more people trying to root than all previous Android tabs combined. Maybe phones too. This probably means a lot of bricks in correlation. Most people that try to root and fail will simply return it, rather than try and fix it. Unless bought from Play store perhaps.
 
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