In true, maddengingly Google fashion yesterday’s announcement of the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 (along with a surprise appearance of the Nexus Player) were all done through the magical wonder of a few press releases. That was it. There wasn’t much fanfare, either from Google or anyone else and the new Nexus devices were ushered into the world quietly, with very little in the way of arm flailing or anything like that. Still, that doesn’t mean that they’re any less impressive, it just would have been nice to get to know them a little bit better, that’s all. The Nexus 9 in particular has proven to become the pretty impressive piece of hardware that we all knew it was going to be, and come tomorrow, October 17th, people will be able to crash the Google Play Store all over again trying to get their hands on the latest Nexus tablet.
What makes the Nexus 9 so special? Well, a number of things, but I’m sure most of you have read the news by now, so I’ll be brief. The first device from HTC and Google since the Nexus One, the Nexus 9 is powered by a 64-bit NVIDIA Tegra K1 which is one of the most powerful mobile chips to appear in a long time. Unlike previous Nexus tablets, which have been geared towards content consumption, the Nexus 9 is something Google hope we’ll be using for everything, from browsing the web, getting work done with the keyboard cover or playing games on.
One major annoyance from yesterday was that we didn’t really get a look at the Nexus 9 in the flesh, it was all press renders from Google themselves and there weren’t even that many of those available in the first place. Enter Tinhte, the Vietnam tech outlet you might remember for great leaks in the past has somehow managed to get their hands on some final production units, in a couple of colors as well as with the type cover in action. While the Nexus 9 is a lot more expensive than last year’s Nexus 7, it looks like not only the internals, but the build quality are up to much higher standards here. While we only have a short video and a gallery from Tinhte and MyDrivers to go on, we have to say this Nexus 9 is looking pretty sharp to us.
