Along with a new Nexus 6 smartphone Google took the wraps off of another vanilla Android Lollipop toting piece of hardware yesterday in the form of the tablet now known as the Nexus 9. Made by HTC and powered by NVIDIA’s latest piece of silicon, the Nexus 9 is the flagship tablet Google will be using to promote it’s next version of the Android operating system to the masses.
The Nexus 9 has more in common with Apple’s iPad mini in terms of display layout than it does with its predecessor the Nexus 7. It switches from the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio, which most of us will be familiar with from our HD TVs, to the same 4:3 aspect ratio of the iPads.
The 8.9 inch IPS LCD display has a resolution of 1 536×2 048 pixels which at 8.9 inches in size makes for a pixel density of 281ppi. If that sounds at all familiar to you then you’ve probably realised that it’s exactly the same resolution as the aforementioned pair of Apple tablets while slotting neatly in between the 9.7 inch display of the iPad Air and the 7.9 inch display of the iPad mini.
Along with the 64-bit quad core 2.3GHz Tegra 1 processor the Nexus 9 runs on 2GB of RAM and comes in three varieties, a 16GB or 32GB model without cellular connectivity or a 32GB model with built in LTE radios. An 8 megapixel camera on the rear and a 1.6 megapixel camera on the front are both present as is standard on tablets these days, though we still cannot for the life of us understand why anyone would need a rear camera on a tablet. The Nexus 9 will come with a 6 700mAh battery which should be good for around 9 hours of mixed use according to HTC falling slightly short of the 10 hour mark that the iPads have always enjoyed.
All of this tech fits into a metal frame that sits at just 7.9mm in thickness, weighing in at just 425g (436g for the LTE model) and includes HTC’s dual speaker BoomSound setup that, in the HTC One (M8) at least, we still rate as the best smartphone speakers we’ve ever heard.
Once again we’ll be keeping out ears close to the ground on this one to see when, if at all, it will be coming into South Africa.
[Image – Google]
