Nexus 9 review: Time to let go

The Google Nexus 9 was our absolute favourite tablet back in the day. Sadly, that day was in 2014, and in 2018 it’s really no longer worthy of your time. Aside from the fact that its dual-core processor will struggle with modern apps, the big selling point of it getting new versions of Android ceased to be true some time ago. It’s capped at Android 7 Nougat, with all the implications for features and security that this implies.

So where should you look instead? Well, at the original £319 price point, one answer is loud and clear – but it will involve you turning your back on Android. The 2018 iPad costs £319 and is about as good as you can get in the price bracket, with the support for the £89 Apple Pencil a delightful bonus.

If your heart is set on Android, then your options are a bit more limited. The non-Pro version of the Huawei MediaPad M5 goes for £310 (8in) or £400 (10.8in) and is a solid tablet. Alternatively, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 is coming down in price, now the Tab S4 is out.

For more options, consult our best tablets list, but you really shouldn’t consider the once-great Nexus 9 in 2018.

Richard’s original review continues below

Design

We were surprised that Google partnered with HTC to manufacture the Nexus 9, but the tablet is easily one of the most appealing and well-made Android tablets around. At just under 8mm thick, the Nexus 9 isn’t the slimmest tablet available – the Air 2 and Sony Xperia Z4 Tablet are noticeably slimmer at 6.1mm – but it is incredibly light, weighing 425g. There’s also a brushed metal trim around the edge, which is polished to a silver gleam along its top edge, while the rear casing comes in black, white or sand, although the latter shade is only available on the 32GB model to give it a degree of exclusivity.

On the plus side, the colours are all complementary and the edges are largely free of buttons, flaps, ports and slots, making for a more streamlined look. Details on the back, such as the camera lens protruding from the curved corner and the recessed Nexus logo, also add a bit of class to the tablet, but the slight amount of flex in the plastic rear panel does fall short of the iPad Air’s metal effort.

We also feel the power and volume buttons could do with being a bit deeper, as their rather flush position doesn’t provide a lot of travel and they can be a bit tricky to locate if you’re just running your finger along the tablet’s edge. Fortunately, you can always wake the tablet by double tapping the screen instead, so you don’t necessarily need to press the power button to turn the screen on.

Storage

Like all Google’s Nexus devices, there’s no microSD expansion slot, so you’ll need to be sure about how much storage you need when you order. The 16GB model is £290, while the 32GB model can be found for £350. However, £60 is a huge premium to pay for just 16GB of extra storage space, as you can get 48GB of extra storage for £80 if you decide to upgrade to the 64GB iPad Air 2. You can get a more reasonable deal if you buy the 32GB 4G model of the Nexus 9, though; £459 is a reasonable price for a 4G 32GB tablet, compared to the £499 and £579 you’ll pay for a 16GB or 64GB 4G iPad.

Display

The standout feature of the Nexus 9 is its 4:3 ratio screen. The vast majority of Android tablets, from the likes of Sony and Samsung, use widescreen displays: 16:10 or 16:9. The Nexus 9, therefore, has more in common with Apple’s 4:3 iPad. We generally prefer 4:3 for using tablets in portrait mode, especially when web browsing, but this screen ratio is arguably less practical for watching films or TV as you’ll end up with black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. This doesn’t seem to put off all those iPad Netflix users, however.

The display is one of the Nexus 9’s stronger elements. Its 8.9in screen has a 2,048×1,536 resolution, the same as the iPad Air 2, and a pixel density of 264ppi. This makes for nice, sharp text and provides plenty of space for reading web pages, regardless of whether the tablet’s in portrait or landscape.

The panel itself is also one of the best we’ve seen. Our measurements showed it was displaying 95.5% of the sRGB colour gamut, which is higher than the iPad Air 2 with its figure of 90.1%. The Nexus 9’s display is also incredibly bright at 455.69cd/m2, making it one of the brightest displays we’ve used. Black levels were good, too, at 0.38cd/m2 and we measured the screen’s contrast ratio as an excellent 1,195:1. Photos look gorgeous with nicely saturated colours.

Speakers

There are two front-facing speakers that sit at the left and right edges of the tablet (when held horizontally to play games or watch video). They’re small, recessed strips and although they’re neatly integrated, they started gathering dust almost immediately, more so than the front-facing speakers of the Nvidia Shield Tablet or even HTC’s own One M8 smartphone, which both use a dotted speaker grille built directly into the front. When you run your fingers over the Nexus 9’s speaker recesses they also feel sharp, though we suppose that dissuades you from putting your thumbs over them.

The speakers use HTC’s BoomSound technology and produce decent sound quality, especially for a tablet. The speakers produce a surprisingly warm sound, at odds with the tinny and harsh audio we’re used to from tablet speakers. There was a good amount of detail to the mid-range and treble and the stereo speakers have excellent channel separation. The Nexus 9’s speakers can also produce a significant amount of volume, so there’s no strong need to immediately plug in headphones. This is one area where the Nexus 9 is comfortably ahead of either iPad Air model.

Performance

The Nvidia Shield Tablet was the first device we saw with an Nvidia Tegra K1 system-on-chip, but the Nexus 9 is the first device to use the full-blooded 64-bit version of the processor. While the Nvidia Shield Tablet has four cores that operate at 2.2GHz, the Nexus 9 only has two, but these run at 2.3GHz and are based on the newer ‘Denver’ CPU. The Nexus 9 is also equipped with 2GB of RAM.

The Nexus 9 scored an outstanding 1,637 in the singlecore test of Geekbench 3 and a staggering 2,818 in the multicore test, making it one of the most powerful and fastest tablets we’ve tested so far. Likewise, its huge Peacekeeper score of 2,020 made for some incredibly slick web browsing, as pages loaded quickly and scrolling produced no stutter whatsoever.

The Nvidia Tegra K1 is no slouch when it comes to gaming performance, either. The Tegra K1 is built around Nvidia’s Kepler GPU architecture with 192 Nvidia CUDA cores. Unsurprisingly, it blitzed through the offscreen Manhattan test in GFXBench GL, scoring a massive 1,942 frames. Unsurprisingly, this is more than enough to handle even demanding games like Blizzard’s Hearthstone and 2D games such as Threes and Alphabear run like a dream.

Battery Life

The Nexus 9’s 6,700mAh battery helped it to an impressive performance in our continuous video playback test, too. Google only rates the Nexus 9 for 9.5 hours of video playback, but with the screen set to our standard 170cd/m2 brightness, we saw 12h 31m before the battery gave out. This doesn’t quite beat what we’ve seen from Sony and Samsung’s little and large tablets, but it’s a good three hours more than either of Apple’s iPads can do.

Camera

The Nexus 9 has a 1.6-megapixel camera on the front and an 8-megapixel camera on the back. Both lenses have an f/2.4 aperture. As far as tablet cameras go, it’s not too bad, but a fair distance away from the quality of the iPad Air 2’s sensor. In our outdoor shots, the colours the camera produced were slightly muted, and images weren’t as sharp as we would have liked. There was also noticeable noise in the shadow details and some images came out slightly under-exposed.

Android 6.0 Marshmallow

As a Google-own-brand device the Nexus 9 gets the latest version of Android first. It launched with Android 5.0 Lollipop but has been running Android 6.0 Marshmallow for some time now. That gives you all the latest features, including Doze for much-improved standby battery life and far better management of app permissions for better security.

That version of the operating system hasn’t yet seen the promised multi-window support but that will come with the Android 7.0 N release later this year. If you’re impatient then you can even update your tablet with the developer beta version now. For more details on that, including the new features and how to install it on your device see our Android N 7.0 review.

It’s also worth remembering that Android devices support proper multiple user accounts, so a single tablet can be shared among two or more people, with each having their own apps, homescreens, browser favourites, email and more. It’s a great idea, although you’ll almost certainly want the 32GB version of the device if you’re planning on using it this way.

Conclusion

The Nexus 9 is still a brilliant tablet and one that’s yet to be replaced by Google. The screen is wonderful, the battery life is fantastic and the build quality and design are good too. There are more powerful tablets around now, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab S2, which has a fantastic AMOLED screen as well. At £300 it’s a bit more expensive than you can pick up a reconditioned Nexus 9 but it’s still a better buy for most people. The Nexus 9 will still appeal to those wanting the latest Android updates and an operating system that’s as Google intended. Buy the Google Nexus 9 now from eBay.