Last year, Apple’s iPad mini 2 offered up a beautiful display with a lightning fast user experience and unquestionably good battery life. If you were looking for an Android tablet to compare the iPad mini with Retina display to, disappointment was all you found. Google’s Nexus 7 offered miserable battery life, an OK display, and an acceptable but still not overly great user experience.
What made the Nexus 7 worth it to many was the value, as it came in significantly cheaper than almost everything else. This year, curiously, when looking at the Nexus 9 and the iPad mini 2 side-by-side, it feels as though everything about last year’s situation has been reversed.Google seems to have ditched the 7-inch tablet and 10-inch tablet options in exchange for something in between, a tablet with a 9-inch display packing a 2048 x 1536 resolution and the latest Nvidia Tegra K1 processor. When combined with all of the performance and polish associated with Android 5.0, there’s an expectation that this device will be more than enough to keep up with the competition. The iPad mini with its 7.9-inch 2048 x 1536 display running iOS 8 seemed like the perfect challenger to this would-be champion, so the two tablets were subjected to a series of real-world use cases to see which came out on top.
You’d be hard pressed to find a substantial performance difference between these two tablets when using them side-by-side for a few brief minutes, but after a couple of hours the differences become clear. Android 5.0 has done wonders for the overall performance of the OS, and this hardware is a great way to show it off.
HTC’s display is incredible, and capable of delivering beautiful colors and a level of brightness that the iPad mini can’t achieve. Conversely, the lack of an anti-glare coating on the Nexus 9 makes outdoor use noticeably less enjoyable than on the iPad.Since HTC’s Nexus 9 is capable of delivering superior audio quality when playing games and watching movies, as a media consumption device the mini can’t really compete. Unless, of course, you enjoy consuming media without having to charge your tablet. When putting the iPad mini and the Nexus 9 through identical real-world battery tests, HTC’s offering died while Apple’s hardware still had 19% of its total battery remaining. To make matters worse there’s a spot adjacent to the camera on the Nexus 9 that gets quite hot when using the tablet to play games, which makes holding it in landscape orientation uncomfortable after a while. The iPad mini also gets rather warm when subjected to the same tests, but the aluminum backing disperses the heat such that there’s not one spot that is too hot to touch.
It may strike you as odd that I am comparing a brand new Nexus tablet to a previous generation Apple tablet, but since there’s no difference in the processor, RAM, display, or storage between the iPad mini with Retina display and the iPad mini 3, there won’t be any difference in performance between the two. You can get the iPad mini 2 for $100 less than the Nexus 9, and that’s significant given how these two devices perform when compared directly.
When choosing between the two, that lower price point is significant and it makes the decision much more difficult for those who aren’t locked in to one ecosystem or the other.