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The Nexus 9 is the best pure Android tablet out right now. It has Lollipop, a cutting edge processor and a new form factor that lends itself wonderfully to average media and social consumption. I’ve spent the last week with it as my daily driver and found that it is lesser than the sum of its parts.
The Looks
HTC has taken their first stab at a tablet in a number of years, and they’re a little rusty. The Nexus 9 sports an interesting mashup of materials that are highlighted by a metal band around the edges and a soft touch plastic backing that is nearly identical to the Nexus 5. The power and volume buttons on the right hand side are, soft. So much so that they blend in with the band a bit too much and make pressing them more difficult than it should be.
The Guts
The Nexus 9 features one of the most bleeding edge chipsets around, the Tegra K1 Dual Denver processor. This isn’t any ordinary nVidia chipset either, it’s the first 64 bit processor to be available that is able to run the 64 bit version of Android 5.0 Lollipop. In benchmarks this thing screams and shows just how blazing fast Lollipop can be.
On the display front, the Nexus 9 has an 8.9″ 2048×1536 IPS screen in an unusual aspect ratio for Android, 4:3. Text is sharp, colors pop nicely and overall, isn’t bad. To top things off, the tablet also features HTC’s signature BoomSound speakers. The dual front facing speakers provide plenty of sound and make games come alive with rich audio and good low end representation.
Hands-On with Nexus 9
The reason I say HTC is a bit rusty when it comes to tablet hardware is because the first few batches of the Nexus 9 have suffered from some crippling manufacturing issues. All units have some give in the backing (some more than others) that make it feel much cheaper than it really is. Many have also reported some significant light bleed in the display making for an uneven image. My particular one suffered from both of these issues, but to a lesser degree than many have reported.
While the display isn’t bad, it’s not exactly good either. In general usage, I found the screen quite lovely and adequate for anything I threw at it. At times colors didn’t seem quite right and text or some on screen elements seemed a bit fuzzy. Over all, the screen gets the job done but in no spectacular way.
General performance was great. The Nexus 9 crushed everything from web browsing to videos and pictures, but sadly, does not live up to its spec sheet. Sometimes YouTube videos would be slow to start up and casting the screen through a Chromecast would give me a lag filled mess on my TV. Gaming was the most disappointing thing though. Since the chipset is an unusual one for Android and only used in this device, gaming on the Nexus 9 suffers significantly. Since most apps do not know about this tablet, the graphics levels are set to low by default with many you cant change. This is especially disappointing since I regularly found myself wishing the graphics were as good I knew the Tegra K1 is capable of in the Shield Tablet.
Speaking of other tablets, given the price, you cant help but compare it to the competition. Looking at the iPad Air 2, there’s not much competition here. The thinness and impossible light weight combine with the beautiful screen and incredible A8X processor to make a tablet that has the specs and performs better than laptops from just a few years ago. The processor alone benchmarks near desktop class and makes everything you do from gaming to daily life a breeze. Sadly the Nexus 9 simply can’t hold its own going toe to toe with the Air 2.
The Verdict
Gone are the days of Nexus being the “developer” device. Google is now firmly planting their hardware flag in the consumer world and focusing their efforts on marketing their platform as such. The Nexus 9 embodies this new vision and represents a new direction for Google’s hardware. What we have here is a top of the line device with top of the line pricing. Looking at its direct competition, at $399, the Nexus 9 is a tough sell. It doesn’t blow the doors off in terms of performance and build quality like the iPad Air 2, it’s not able to keep up gaming wise like the Shield Tablet that outperforms it in every benchmark, nor is it priced correctly like majority of Samsung Galaxy Tab S devices.
The Android tablet hardware ecosystem is full of variety, with most settling around a certain family of processor. This makes app optimization predictable and transitions between technological generations fairly painless. The Nexus 9 is its own worst enemy using a non-standard chipset forcing developers to modify their apps and games to support it. Along with the build quality issues that have plagued the launch and the newness of Lollipop; right now at this price point, I cant honestly recommend the Nexus 9 to anyone.
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