T-Mobile had some exciting news for us this morning, they announced that Google’s latest Nexus tablet, the Nexus 9, will begin being sold through them today. The best part of this news is that the Google Nexus 9 being sold through T-Mobile is LTE enabled marking this the first time that customers are able to buy an LTE model of the Nexus 9. Even Google is still only selling Wi-Fi only models from the Google Play Store.
Today the tablet will be available through T-Mobile for $599.76 outright or you can finance it for $24.99 per month. This makes T-Mobile the first US carrier to offer the Nexus 9 to their customers. Also, if you want to add the Nexus 9 tablet to your data plan it will cost you an extra $10 per month. This will get you up to 5GB of data specifically for your tablet depending on your current data plan. Don’t forget that T-Mobile also has their “Free Data for Life” deal that allows T-Mobile customers 200 MB of free tablet data a month with no strings attached, anything past that will need to be paid for.
While T-Mobile offering the Nexus 9 with LTE does come as great news, there is a little something that worries us. That little something is battery life. The Nexus 9 already has pretty shoddy and unpredictable battery life with Wi-Fi as is, now add LTE to the mix and things can get bad. Especially with the Tegra K1 chip that powers the Nexus 9 using an off-die modem it will be interesting to see how battery life on the LTE model holds up. Something else worth noting is that the LTE model of the Nexus 9 being sold through T-Mobile is significantly more expensive than the Wi-Fi only model. Where the LTE model will run you $600 the Wi-Fi model will only cost you $400, that’s a difference of $200 for the addition of LTE capabilities. We are just saying, if LTE isn’t that important of a feature for you then you are much better off going to the Google Play Store or even heading down to your local best buy and picking up a Wi-Fi only model. But, if LTE is important to you and you are a T-Mobile customer, $25 a month is a decent deal for the LTE Nexus 9.