Gadgetory

hey what is up guys I'm Kim PhD here and welcome to the review of the tablet I waited so long for the Nexus 9 this is going to be a pretty brief review because there isn't really that much different or new about the Nexus 9 nothing spectacular about it it's basically HTC's safest bet ever so the Nexus 9 it's a 9 inch tablet it's running stock Android 5.0 lollipop right now and it's somewhere in between the Nexus 10 from two years ago and the Nexus 7 from last year so like I said it's a 9 inch display with this sort of a squarish 4 by 3 aspect ratio that all the iPads have and it has the soft touch back which is extremely similar to actually what we saw in the Nexus 7 it's not a fancy metal or anything just a layer of thin plastic with a soft touch coating on the back the bit of metal we do get is on the sides which gives a tablet these flat sides for better grip ability it even makes one-handed use a little easier for me but yeah it's a thin chamfered ring of metal around the edges where you can grip the tablet on that's about it in terms of build quality it does say the word Nexus on the back filled in the same way it does on the back of the phone the Nexus 6 and the camera on the bag does protrude a little bit but not enough to make it rock on an even surface so it still lays flat so that's fine the only really noteworthy thing actually about the hardware for me is the buttons which are terrible they're awful buttons they're really close to flush and super mushy they're not clicky or tactile at all if you close your eyes basically and try to press the power button you wouldn't know when you turned it on or not that's how little click there is and if there is any less travel it would literally be inside the tablet it's ridiculous how hard it is to press now HTC has apparently noted that this is a problem so if you order a nexus 9 today you'll actually get a sort of a nexus 9 2.0 it's a revised hardware model with new clicky err more tactile buttons so that's good for people who are getting it now but that's not solving my problem but one thing that's nice is HTC is built-in tapped awake so you can double tap the display when it's off to wake it up and that'll I guess help me avoid using the crappy button just it's too bad there's no double tap to sleep which means I still have to use the button to turn it off but it's a step in the right direction anyway the rest of the hardware is totally fine up front you have a nine inch display with the 2048 by 1536 resolution again the same as those iPads so that's slightly larger display and pretty average sized bezels make this tablet like I said a bit larger than the Nexus 7 or the iPad Mini and the display is pretty good I think it's one of the high points of the tablet its resolution makes it pretty sharp so it comes in at over 280 pixels per inch there's very little color shift it's really saturated and certain overall really good looking display viewing angles are nice so overall I give a thumbs up to the panel the only thing is it does have a bit of a light leak problem from the backlight so when it's dark out or when the lights are off or you use this tablet at night you will notice the uneven lighting and we'll call it light bleeding in from the sides around the edge of the tablet you can only find this on really low quality panels but I only really notice it again when it's dark so it's the only con I found to an otherwise very nice display flanking the display are yes dual stereo front-facing speakers these top off the media experience of the Nexus 9 very well and honestly they're not even that great speakers again they're pretty similar to the front-facing ones on the Nvidia shield they're not spectacular but simply placing them on the front makes them so much better than the iPad or the Nexus 7 speakers which are side facing or rear facing so front facing speakers are great they get loud enough that you can hear from across the room if you're into that it's not boom sound or anything but I will gladly take it also on the back you have an 8 megapixel camera it's good for basically just scanning barcodes it's not really a good camera for anything past that it kind of looks similar just looking at it to the Nexus 5 but I don't see a lot of people buying this tablet for the camera quality so yeah it's it's there if you need it but hopefully you don't need it so yeah you can tell there's nothing really all that incredible about the hardware of the Nexus 9 here it's really all about the software experience it's running the latest version of Android out the box and of course will continue to be first in line for updates so when Google releases them here we have Android 5.0 lollipop as smooth as ever on the 64-bit NVIDIA k1 chip with two gigs of RAM actually and a lot of what you find here is really just the phone experience and blown up to a larger display that can also rotate landscape not sure if that's a good or a bad thing that it's moving towards that gradually but I guess it seems like when we first started with Android on tablets there were a lot more tablets specific interface tweaks like the notification bar on the left and the quick settings on the right but I guess for the sake of continuity it's slowly moving back to a more simplified interface that resembles a phone more but I'd still like to see Android 5.0 take advantage of the larger display in a few more places maybe I just need to add more widgets or something I guess since its Android I can do that either way I really like Android 5.0 here and pretty much all of the apps I use are here so if you're coming from an iPad that story might be a little bit different but I'm a heavy Google service user and this is great for me and again performance here is really smooth basically as smooth as or smoother than any other Android tablet experience except sometimes it likes to hang when launching apps like on a blazing fast 64-bit tablet launching the YouTube app it shouldn't hang that long it shouldn't take that long to open up an app it happened on occasion but particularly when I'm multitasking a lot and a lot of apps are dropping out of the 2 gigs of ram but in the past it hasn't really been a problem and everything else has been as smooth as expected and in app performance 2 is also really smooth it's a great media tablet so I played a lot of games I was smooth the entire time there no dropped frames same deal with web browsing in Chrome messing around with other tablet optimized apps the experience has always been very very quick and very smooth so that's great you also get all the latest and greatest features so if Google comes out with some fancy new features in Android that roll out tomorrow people with a Nexus device will be the first to get it I'll leave a link to my review of Android 5.0 right below if you want to check that out there's some good stuff in here useful stuff like screen pinning lockscreen notifications and material design everywhere all these animations it's all good stuff and I happen to love it so yeah Nexus 9 it's a nice lightweight good performing compact tablet running stock Android because of its size it's like right on the border between and one handed and two handed use it both are really okay it's also a bit of a smaller battery just to note it's a 6700 milliamp hour battery so you'll probably charge it every two or three days instead of every five or six like with the same usage on bigger tablets oh and pro tip if you're choosing between colors still I would go with the white Nexus 9 and Nexus 6 because the black of the same material is a serious fingerprint magnet the white doesn't really show fingerprints nearly as much so at the end of the day I have some very specific mixed feelings about the Nexus 9 I think when a lot of us heard that it was going to be made by HTC we had these really high expectations for the build quality the last notable thing that HTC made was the One m8 and that phone is known for its build quality and beastly speakers so a lot of us were expecting this new Nexus tablet to be known for its build quality and beastly speakers well it has decent speakers but it's built exactly the same really as the Nexus 7 was if you added metal sides to it so it's not that special in terms of build and a lot of people are going to have that wake-up call when they finally receive it so it should be priced lower it's a $400 tablet right now for the lowest end 16 gig Wi-Fi only model in the Play Store and for that price it's hard to recommend because it essentially feels like a slightly larger Nexus 7 and the Nexus 7 was really good for the price it was known for how cheap it was so you got to pick somewhere between really well priced and really premium and well built and right now it's not striking that balance I think this this is a better tablet to be sold at $300 and I think sooner or later is going to be sold for $300 maybe not in the Play Store but it's kind of hard to sell this tablet for 400 bucks also in the Nvidia shield tablet is also out there running lollipop with front-facing speakers the NVIDIA k1 not quite the same 64-bit chip but very similar specs and a really nice build for 300 bucks it's sitting out there cannibalizing sales essentially competing with this Nexus 9 so hard to recommend buying it for 400 bucks but if you have to have a Nexus tablet you have to have the stock Android experience first is you don't get a lollipop immediately on the shield tablet then the software experience is what you would buy this next 9 tablet 4 and that's what I would recommend it for people who are buying this tablet for the software experience this is not a tablet to buy for the hardware experience because it's not that great it's not going to feel like 400 bucks even the iPad Mini retina is completely made of metal and far outclasses all of the build quality of the other tablets out there that are made of plastic so I recommend taking a look at the software experience if you want to buy this tablet otherwise there are other I review the Nvidia shield tablet I'll leave the link to that right below if you want to check that out too and there are other options to consider but you got to have a nexus you got to have a nexus thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this video feel free to hit that thumbs up button below and there are more videos like this coming so be sure to subscribe if you haven't already again thanks and I'll talk to you guys in the next one peace