Nexus 9 review - the best Android tablet yet.

With its first tablet, the Nexus 7, Google provided a brilliant bargain alternative for those unwilling to spend £399 on an iPad. Larger Android tablets, including Google's own Nexus 10, had markedly less success against the iPad juggernaut. And it appeared for some time that Google had no stomach to take on Apple head-to-head.

The new 8.9in Nexus 9 changes all that, in size it's a reasonable alternative to both the 9.7in iPad and the 7.9in iPad Mini. In price, the Nexus 9 is matched up to Apple's original iPad Air, released last year, with both costing £319 for the basic model. Its 4:3 ratio display makes it more iPad-like than any major Android tablet before, and the high-quality design and materials are also a match for Apple's finest.

We admit to being surprised when news broke that Google would be partnering with HTC to manufacture the Nexus 9. HTC has only brought one tablet to market to date, the so-so HTC Flyer back in 2011. The company’s successful series of smartphones has likely played a role in the company’s selection and some of the HTC One’s design has transferred over to the Nexus 9.

Nexus 9 Design

The Nexus 9 is a well-built tablet, and its certainly more appealing than anything else currently running Android. It's something of a coup that the only device worthy of comparison is the iPad Air itself. There’s a brushed metal trim around the edge, which is polished to a silver gleam along its top edge, while the rear casing that comes in black, white or a champagne gold that Google refers to as Sand. The latter shade is only available on the 32GB model to give it a degree of exclusivity. Those edges are arguably a bit busy, then. When the tablet is viewed at an angle, and the black bezel of the display is also in view, there are four different finishes (black, silver, brushed metal, rear case colour) in a very small area.

On the plus side, the colours are all complementary and the edges are largely free of buttons, flaps, ports and slots, making for a streamlined look. Details on the back, such as the camera lens protruding from the curved corner and the nexus logo itself are very classily handled, but the plastic rear panel, despite a lovely matt finish, does just fall short of the iPad Air's metal effort.

We found the power and volume buttons difficult to press. They sit almost flush with the side, and just above the lip of the rear casing, plus they have little travel to them. The power button can prove difficult to locate, with your finger easily sliding over it. Thankfully, the Nexus 9 supports double tap to wake, a new feature in Android 5.0. So instead of searching for the power button, you can just double tap the screen instead.

Like all of Google’s Nexus devices, there’s no microSD expansion so you’ll need to be sure on how much capacity you need at time of ordering. The 16GB model is £319, while the 32GB model is £399. £80 is a huge premium for 16GB of extra storage space, with even Apple only charging £40 more for its 32GB iPad Air. You can get a more reasonable deal if you buy the 32GB model with 4G/LTE, at £459 it's the same price as the equivalent iPad Air.

We were pleased to see no flex to the Nexus 9’s screen or chassis. At a fraction less than 8mm in thickness, the Nexus 9 isn’t the sveltest tablet available, it's roughly equivalent to the original Air, though the new Air 2 is noticeably slimmer at 6.1mm. It weighs 425g, which is marginally lighter than the iPad Air 2, although the iPad has a slightly larger screen of course, and feels lighter for its size. The back of the Nexus 9 is made from a matt plastic with a very light soft-touch feel, and the whole thing is comfortable to grasp one-handed for a while, though its screen size and weight make it more of a two-handed device - think iPad Air rather than iPad Mini.

Nexus 9 Display

The standout feature of the Nexus 9 is its 4:3 ratio screen. the vast majority of Android tablets, from the likes of Google 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 prefer 4:3 for using tablets in portrait, say for web browsing, but arguably make it less ideal for wathcing movies or TV as you’ll end up with black bars at the top and bottom of the screen - though that hasn't put off Netflix users on iPads.

The display is one of the Nexus 9’s stronger elements. Its 8.9in screen has a QXGA resolution (2,048x1,536) giving a pixel density of 264ppi. In terms of pure pixel density, this isn’t as high as on the Nexus 10 but the difference can’t really be seen. This also happens to be the same resolution as Apple’s retina display on any current Retina-class iPad. This makes for nice and sharp text that makes reading a joy.

Our colour calibrator showed that the display was able to produce accurate colours as well. It’s able to produce 93.8% of the sRGB colour gamut, which is very impressive. Interestingly, this is higher than the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 that promised 100% coverage but in reality only managed 88.7%. It’s also higher than the iPad Air 2 that produced a very good 90.1%.

The Nexus 9’s display is also incredibly bright at 466.4 cd/m2, making it one of the brightest displays we’ve used. It’s comfortable to use in outdoor lighting. Black levels, too, were good at 0.38 cd/m2 and contrast ratio was an excellent 1,224:1. The display was one of our favourite aspects of the Nexus 9 with photos looking gorgeous and nicely saturated.

We were initially concerned there might be some issue with the 4:3 screen and games, but all of the games we tested scaled to the aspect ratio accordingly with proper art assets filling the extra vertical space rather than black bars or the sides being cropped. Some games did give you a squarer view of the world, with more vertical space and less horizontal, as in Assassin's Creed below, but that's fine with us.

^Assassin's Creed Pirates - Nexus 9 on the left, Nvidia Shield Tablet on the right

^Jetpack Joyride - Nexus 9 on the left, Nvidia Shield Tablet on the right

Nexus 9 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 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.

They use HTC’s BoomSound technology and produce decent sound quality, especially for a tablet. The speakers produce a surprisingly warm sound when we’re used to hearing tinny and harsh. There was a good amount of detail to the mids and treble and the stereo speakers have excellent channel separation. The Nexus 9’s speakers also produce a decently loud maximum 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.

Nexus 9 Performance

The Nvidia Shield Tablet was the first device we saw with an Nvidia Tegra K1 system-on-chip, but the Nexus 9 is teh first device to use the full-blooded 64-bit version of the chip. While the Nvidia Shield Tablet has four cores that operate at 2.2GHz, the Nexus 9 only has two cores although these run at 2.3GHz and are based on the newer ‘Denver’ CPU. The Nexus 9 is also equipped with 2GB of RAM, which isn’t quite as high as we have seen with tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4, but should still be sufficient especially considering the memory optimisations in Android 5.0 Lollipop (more on this later).

The Nexus 9 managed a time of 908.8ms in our SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, which is a respectable score but not as fast as the quad-core Tegra K1 in the Nvidia Shield Tablet that managed a score of 673.7ms. It’s also a distance away from the iPad Air 2 that managed it in an astronomical 295.8ms, making it the fastest mobile device we’ve tested for browser speed.

We're a bit surrpised by that score, though we suspect it may be down more to the operating system and browser than the K1 chip itself and future optimisations could improve things radically. In real-world use you certainly won't have any complaints about performance. Browsing was slick with the Guardian hompage, which is image heavy, loading quickly and we could scroll around it without any stutters.

The Nvidia Tegra K1 has proven to be 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 managed to max out our Ice Storm Extreme benchmark. In the Ice Storm Unlimited test, it managed a score of 25,621, which is a fantastic achievement. In this benchmark it's faster than both the iPad Air (14,821) and the iPad Air 2 (21,548).

Now Apple has made much of its new Metal API for getting the most out of its hardware, but presuming Google can keep up with its software tools, the Nexus 9's hardware has the edge. Its only real rival is the similarly-powered Nvidia Shield Tablet, that managed an incredible 27,000. Both tablets currently lead the pack for mobile gaming performance.

Outside of sheer processing power, the Nexus 9 includes 802.11ac Wi-Fi that will allow faster transfer speeds when used with an 802.11ac router. With the right kit you should be able to get speeds that won't bottleneck anything but the very fastest home broadband connections.

Nexus 9 Battery Life

The Nexus 9 has a 6,700mAh battery that produced excellent battery life in our video playback test. With the tablet in Airplane mode, screen brightness and volume set to halfway, we managed 15 hours and 57 minutes before the battery gave out. That's around three and-a-half hours more than the iPad Air or iPad Air 2.

Google rate the battery life at a highly-conservative 9.5 hours for video playback, although it’s not clear under what circumstances Google’s test was conducted. In any case, battery life was impressive. Alongside Google’s Project Volta improvements in Android 5.0, the Nexus 9 should have excellent battery life for everyday use.

Nexus 9 Camera Quality

Despite what Apple may say about its new iPad Air 2, we're not too bothered about tablet cameras. Here there's 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. In our outdoor shots, the colours it produced were slightly muted colours and 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.

Low-light indoor shots were average and a lot of detail was lost in the shadows, with the fur of our cuddly toy appearing as a blur of colour without any texture. Sharpness was respectable, however. There’s also an LED flash that will help with low-light photography. It wasn’t too harsh or over-powering in our test shot, helping to balance the ambient light and produce a faster shutter speed resulting in a sharper photo. You probably shouldn’t rely on the Nexus 9 as your main camera, but in a pinch it does a decent job.

^With LED flash

^Without LED flash

Android 5.0 Lollipop

The Nexus 9 is one of the first devices to launch with the latest version of Android. We’ll go into more detail in a separate full review but the operating system feels right at home on the Nexus 9. First off, of course, this is a pure version of Android, without the often aggravating modifications made by vendors on their own-brand devices.

The most immediate difference is through Google’s new Material design philosophy that flattens a lot of the user interface and introduces card-based menus that you might already be familiar with from Google’s context-sensitive service Google Now. There are also slick new animations that look wonderful on the tablet’s gorgeous screen.

Notifications now use the same card interface and you’re easily able to swipe them away. The settings quick toggle has now been changed and can be accessed by a second pull of the notification panel or a two-finger swipe from the status bar to get there directly.

One of the best updates in Android 5.0 is the ability to more easily restore from another Android device. While previously you could restore apps when setting up a new device, Android 5.0 now restores your folders as well, so all that time getting everything organised doesn’t go to waste. There are other changes elsewhere, like notifications that now appear on your lockscreen and that can be expanded. SmartLock lets you pair Bluetooth devices, such as Android Wear smartwatches or Bluetooth headphones, and these can bypass your lockscreen password saving you time but maintain a degree of security.

It's also worth remebering 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, though you'll almost certainly want the 32GB version of the device if you're planning on using it this way.

Nexus 9 Conclusion

The Nexus 9 is among the best tablets we've ever seen. The screen is wonderful, the speakers are great, the battery life is fantastic and the build quality and design arguably better everything bar the iPad Air. The only negatives are that the design around the bezel could be seen as a little busy, the upgrade to 32GB is frankly overpriced, and if you calculate grams-per-inch (of screen size) it's touch heftier than the superlight iPads.

That said, if you’re looking for a powerful Android tablet, then nothing else can compete right now. We prefer the 4:3 aspect ratio for general use, despite it being less suited to watching movies in landscape. The screen size should please most people, it's certainly big enough at 8.9in. It will be interesting to see if the Nexus 9 ushers in a new era of 4:3 Android tablets.

Its K1 chipset makes it one of the best choices for gamers too, but that brings us to a problem beyond, Nvidia's, HTC's and even Google's control. There are simply more games available for iOS and they generally come out their first. We're hoping that a popular, large, 4:3 ratio Android tablet will help redress that, but if Android gamers continue to spend less on apps than their iOS counterparts, the divide will continue to exist.

Finally we have an Android device that can compete with the mighty iPads, with the Nexus 9 and iPad Air models trading blows. We still think the iPad Air just inches ahead, but if you'd prefer an Android device (and many will), there's now a tablet you can buy without feeling you're getting something second best.