Hands On: Apple’s iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3

The other big announcement for the day is of course Apple’s new iPads, the iPad Air 2 and the iPad mini 3. As signaled by their names, neither is intended to be a massive departure from their (still for sale) predecessors. But both of them, the …

Google Announces the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 Running Android Lollipop

Today Google has officially announced the newest devices in the Nexus line, just one day before Apple’s October event. Both devices have been rumored for some time now, and this is the first time in a while that we’ve seen Google introduce a new smartphone and tablet at the same time. The first device in the announcement is the Nexus 6, made by Motorola. The second is the Nexus 9 tablet made by HTC. To give an overview of how both devices look on paper, I’ve put together their specifications in a chart below.

The Nexus 6 features a similar appearance to Motorola’s other devices like the Moto X and Moto G. The plastic back is surrounded by a contoured aluminum frame that curves downward at the top where the 3.5mm headphone jack is located. On the back is Google’s traditional Nexus logo, accompanied by an indented motorola logo and a centered rear-facing camera. The front is dominated by a large 5.96″ display with a pixel density of 493ppi, and stereo speakers on the top and bottom bezels.

In terms of its specifications, the Nexus 6 is competitive with all the current Android flagship devices. It packs Qualcomm’s latest silicon, a hefty battery, and a high resolution display. However, those premium specs are accompanied by a premium price of $649 outright which is significantly more than the $349 that the Nexus 5 is priced at. The Nexus 5 has been given a new web page along with the other Nexus devices which suggests it isn’t going disappear with the launch of this newer, more expensive smartphone.

The next announcement was the Nexus 9 made by HTC. This is the first tablet from HTC since the days of Android Gingerbread and Honeycomb where HTC announced they were exiting the tablet market. With its soft touch back, the Nexus 9 is similar in its design to the Nexus 5. Unlike the Nexus 5 which was an entirely plastic construction, the sides of the Nexus 9 are made of brushed metal.

The front of the device is similar to the Nexus 7 with its asymmetrical bezels. The shape of the device is a departure from any tablet Google has produced before, with a 2048×1536 4:3 display like Apple’s iPad. Both the 8.9″ display size and 4:3 aspect ratio make the Nexus 9 a significantly larger device than the Nexus 7.

The SoC is the biggest point of interest with the Nexus 9. It will be the first device to ship with Nvidia’s Project Denver architecture. This is a custom 64-bit ARMv8 architecture designed by Nvidia, a significant departure from the standard ARM cores used in previous Tegra chips. We covered the details about Tegra K1 Denver previously and you can read that over to get a more in-depth look at NVIDIA’s new chip.

Along with the new device announcements comes the official name for the next version of Android. Android L is now Android 5.0 Lollipop, and it will ship on the new Nexus 6 and Nexus 9. Lollipop comes with Google’s new Material Design and Google’s new ART runtime, and will be rolling out to existing compatible Nexus and Google Play Edition devices in the coming weeks.

The Nexus 9 will be available for pre-order on October 17th starting at $399 for 16GB, while the Nexus 6 will be available sometime in late October at $649 for 32GB.

HTC Reportedly Manufacturing Google’s Nexus 9 Tablet

WSJ.D reports today that Google’s upcoming Nexus 9 tablet will be manufactured by HTC. The last HTC tablet was the Flyer back in 2011, so the Nexus 9 marks the end of HTC’s three year hiatus from the Android tablet market. This also reflects Google’s desire to team up with a variety of partners for their Nexus devices, so as to avoid becoming dependent on any one particular company. HTC manufactured the original Nexus One smartphone back in 2010, but in the interim we’ve seen Nexus devices from ASUS, LG, and Samsung. Samsung in particular has made more Nexus devices than any other company, but considering Samsung’s already large presence in the Android market it’s understandable that Google might want to look for other options.

There’s little in the way of official specifications for the Nexus 9, but if you remember earlier this month when NVIDIA announced it was suing Samsung and Qualcomm, the legal documents (since redacted) made specific mention of the Nexus 9 and the Tegra K1 processor. That’s a particularly interesting choice, as NVIDIA already has their SHIELD Tablet with Tegra K1, which ships with an 8-inch display. What we don’t know is if the Nexus 9 will use the same Tegra K1 that’s currently in the SHIELD Tablet, or if it will be a new variant sporting Denver CPU cores. The latter would seem more likely, as otherwise the Nexus 9 would essentially be a slightly larger version of the SHIELD Tablet, albeit with different styling (and of course no MicroSD slot).

Putting a Tegra K1 in the Nexus 9 may also be something of a “mea culpa” from Google to NVIDIA. After the Tegra 3 NVIDIA had little success in getting Tegra 4 into devices other than the SHIELD handheld, and while NVIDIA has been somewhat infamous for saying, “Wait for the next Tegra – that will be the one to beat,” Tegra K1 for a change is actually living up to the NVIDIA hype. The result is that it can be difficult to find the SHIELD Tablet at its $299 MSRP (though Newegg has inventory it appears), so supply at present has not been able to fully keep up with demand. It’s also not too much of a stretch to imagine the Nexus 9 being the launch vehicle for Android L, and at the recent NVIDIA Editors’ Day where we were briefed on GM204, there was at least one conversation that suggested Tegra K1 would be one of the first (if not the first) SoCs to get Android L.

Whatever the hardware inside the Nexus 9, Google’s Nexus devices have traditionally sold quite well so HTC should see much better sales figures compared to their Flyer tablet. Google also tends to be very hands-on with the designs of Nexus devices, the result being that there generally aren’t any major flaws compared to other smartphones or tablets. There’s no information or screenshots for the Nexus 9 at present, but this collaboration has clearly been going on for more than a few months so we expect an official announcement of the Nexus 9 can’t be too far off – just in time for the holiday shopping spree. Will we see Nexus 9 + HTC + Tegra K1 + Android L this fall? Yeah, it’s looking that way.