The Google Nexus 9 Review
by Joshua Ho & Ryan Smith on February 4, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- HTC
- Project Denver
- Android
- Mobile
- NVIDIA
- Nexus 9
- Lollipop
- Android 5.0
Software
With the Nexus 9, Google has released the biggest upgrade to Android since 4.0. In some ways, Android 5.0 represents one of the biggest shifts in the design of the OS ever. While we’ve had JIT compiling on Dalvik since Android 2.2, this has remained largely static for the past few years during Android’s monumental growth. With Android 5.0, we see the introduction of Android Runtime, or ART. Instead of trying to compile the application right before execution, ART does most of the compilation well before the application is launched. This incurs higher storage requirements, longer app-install times, and longer first-boot times, but with great benefits to performance. Google has done a great deal of work in general to try and resolve performance issues, as we first detailed in our coverage on ART.
While performance is one major aspect of Android 5.0, Google has also fundamentally redesigned the interface. To replace Holo, Google has introduced Material Design, which emphasizes depth, physics, animation, and a new palette of colors. While it would be great to go over all of these aspects of the Nexus 9, it’s best to refer to Brandon's review of Android 5.0 Lollipop for these issues. Instead, for this review I will mostly focus on the Lollipop experience specific to the Nexus 9. This means that the focus will be on performance of the device in general usage, along with the app ecosystem for Android tablets.
Unfortunately, these seem to be sore points of the Nexus 9 and the broader Android tablet ecosystem. Without question, if we’re talking about tablet applications they definitely do exist for the Nexus 9. The problem is that there is a pervasive lack of applications that are truly designed for a 9 inch, 4:3 aspect ratio display. Applications like Twitter, Facebook, and other first-party apps are simply blown up versions of the phone application. There is some level of extra content presented, but a lot of applications just don’t scale correctly which wastes a lot of real estate on the display. While we found issue with the Nexus 6’s lack of phablet-specific layouts, this is an even bigger issue on the Nexus 9.
While it’s possible to point fingers at app developers for not supporting Android properly, Google seems to have these problems as well. The settings interface is a single large pane of options, instead of a dual-pane interface that allows for simultaneous navigation of the overall settings and individual settings. The Play Store application is mostly similar in this respect, and the YouTube app is possibly the worst example of these kinds of issues. For example, while there is a tablet-specific video view in landscape, most navigation, search, and video selection is identical to what we see on a smartphone.
Nothing really takes advantage of the screen size other than simply being bigger than before. There aren’t any multi-window modes that exploit the larger screen size, and in general the Nexus 9 doesn’t introduce any new functionality that clearly justifies the need for a bag/backpack to carry it. There are applications that take advantage of the larger display, but these are rare. For the most part though, this is effectively true for most tablets other than the Surface Pro 3 which is effectively in a different category altogether.
On the performance side, the story is better but it isn’t perfect either. Similar to Brandon’s experience with the Nexus 6, I often saw random stutters on animations such as the app drawer or while opening an application. It’s hard to say what the cause is at this point, as the Nexus 6 seems to have similar issues with lag even though the Nexus 5 has none of these issues. One might point to FDE causing worse performance, but even that isn’t quite accurate as a build of Lollipop with FDE disabled didn’t do all that much in the way of solving these problems. Overall though, the experience is somehow less performant than the SHIELD Tablet on Android 5.0, even if these issues mostly present themselves in the form of minor frame drops from time to time. I also noticed that there was a distinct lack of available memory over time, which suggests a memory leak as on reboot launcher redraws effectively disappeared.
While these are significant issues that need to be resolved, the experience isn’t actually as bad as it seems. For what it’s worth, Material Design is a great new design scheme to replace the somewhat dated Holo UI that has been in use since Honeycomb/Android 3.0. While there are issues with the tablet experience, if one is willing to look past these issues they will find that the Nexus 9 is a respectable software experience. There’s also the potential for the Nexus 9 to spur improved tablet experiences, although this would be a slow change that could take years to be meaningful.
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melgross - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
So, people only buy devices during the first three months?Impulses - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Apparently... Although getting the review in before February would've shut all these people up, cheapest place to get the Nexus 9 all thru the holidays was Amazon ($350 for 16GB) and they gave you until January 31 to return it regardless of when you bought it.Only reason I'm so keenly aware is I bought one as a February birthday gift, opened it last weekend just to check it was fine before the return window closed... Not much backlight bleed at all even tho it was manufacturerd in October (bought in late December), some back flex but it's going in a case anyway.
blzd - Friday, February 6, 2015 - link
What does the month of manufacture have to do with the back light bleed? You don't actually believe those "revision" rumors, do you?If you do, consider how practical it is for a hardware revision to come out 1 month after release. Then consider how one set of pictures on a Reddit post proves anything other than that their RMA worked as intended.
ToTTenTranz - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I wish more smartphone/tablet makers put as much thought into their external speakers as HTC does.Once having a HTC One M7, I simply can't go back to mono speakers at the back of devices.
Dribble - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Glad the review is here at last, next one a little bit quicker please :)UpSpin - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
I have following issues with your review:1. You run webbrowser tests and derive CPU performance from it. That's nonsense! It's a web-browser test, and it won't be a CPU test whatever you do. If you want to test raw CPU performance you have to run native CPU test applications.
2. Your battery life analysis is based on false assumptions and you derive doubtful claims from it.
The error is quite evident on the iPad Air test. In your newly introduced white display test, with airplane on, CPU/GPU idling, etc. the iPad Air 2 has a battery life of 10:18 hours. Now in your web-browsing battery test with WiFi on and the CPU busy, the iPad Air 2 has a battery life of 9:76 hours. That's a difference of 4%. The Nexus 9 has a difference of 30%, the Note 4 15%, the Shield Tablet 25%.
You conclude: The Tegra K1 is inefficient. But I could also conclude that the A8 is inefficient and the Tegra K1 very efficient. The Tegra K1 needs significantly less power while idling, compared to the A8, which consumes always the same, mostly independent on the load. So finally, the A8 lacks any kind of power saving mode.
That's abstruse, but the consequence of your test. Or maybe your test is flawed from the beginning on.
3. " I suspect we’re looking at the direct result of the large battery, combined with an efficient display as the Nexus 9 can last as long as 15 hours in this test compared to the iPad Air 2’s 10 hours."
Sorry, but I don't get this either. The Nexus 9 has a 25.46 WHr battery, the iPad Air 2 a 27.3 WHr battery (+7%). The Nexus 9 has a 8.9" Display, the iPad Air 2 a 9.7". (+19% area). The resolution is the same, thus the DPI on the Nexus 9 higher. The display techonoly is the same, as you said in your analysis. So the difference must be related to something else, like a highly efficient idle SoC in the Nexus 9.
Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
The battery life tests analysis is based on true facts on the technical workings of the SoC and its idle power states and we are confident in the resulting conclusions.JarredWalton - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
Going along with what Andrei said, an SoC isn't "efficient" if it's doing no work -- the A8 may not have idle power as low as the K1-64, but when you're actually doing anything more with the tablet in question is when efficiency matters. It's clear that the Air 2 wins out over the Nexus 9 in some of those tests (GFX in particular). Doing more (or equivalent) work while using less power is efficient.Imagine this as an example of why idle power only matters so far: if you were to start comparing cars on how long they could idle instead of actual gas mileage, would anyone care? "Car XYZ can run for 20 hours off a tank while idle while Car ZYX only lasts 15 hours!" Except, neither car is actually doing what a car is suppose to do, which is take you from point A to point B.
The white screen test is merely a way to look at the idle power draw for a device, and by that we can get an idea of how much additional power is needed when the device is actually in use. Also note that it's possible due to the difference in OS that Android simply better disables certain services in the test scenario and iOS might be wasting power -- the fact that the battery life hardly changes in our Internet WiFi test even suggests that's the case.
To that end, the battery life of the N9 is still quite good. Get rid of the smartphones in the charts and it's actually pretty much class leading. But it's still odd that the NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet and iPad Air 2 only show a small drop between idle and Internet, while N9 loses 33% of its battery life.
ABR - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
Idle power is pretty important for real world use for tablets, for example where you are reading something and the system is just sitting there. Those "load web page then pause for xx time" test would probably be really good for measuring.JarredWalton - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
That's exactly what our Internet test does, which is why the 33% drop in battery life is so alarming. What exactly is going on that N9 loading a generally not too complex web page every 15 seconds or so kills battery life?