Rumors are flying that Google has picked HTC to make its next tablet, the Nexus 9, even though the Taiwanese firm swore off tablets after its ill-fated Flyer launch in 2011.
The purported device, codenamed Volantis by HTC, has apparently been the focus of a collaboration between the two firms, which has seen the OEM’s engineers regularly flying to the Google campus to work with their counterparts there.
While neither side has confirmed the rumors, it is known that the Nexus 9 tablet exists thanks to documents filed in a court case between Nvidia and Qualcomm/Samsung, which confirm that the device will be using Nvidia’s Tegra K1 processor and that it is expected in Q3 2014.
That shows Google keeping its Nexus net spread widely, boosting two companies which have been under pressure in the mobile market this year – HTC, one of the only smartphone vendors with no tablet offering, and struggling to reverse a market share slide; and Nvidia, which has been largely unsuccessful in pushing Tegra into high volume devices, and has admitted its integrated processor/modem product has been a failure.
Nvidia does have a base in high end tablets, however, and the use of K1 should ensure the Nexus 9 is a hefty beast. The 28nm K1 uses the same Kepler architecture as its creator’s flagship PC GPUs, supporting DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.4 and CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture – the vendor’s parallel processing platform), being run by the K1’s 192 CUDA cores.
The K1 can support resolutions up to 3840x2160p (4K/UHD1) on its LCD output, but up to 4096x2160p (true 4K) over HDMI. The CPU platform is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A15, with a maximum clock rate of 2.3GHz. The chip can also support a maximum of 8Gbytes of DDR3 RAM.
This leaves plenty of options for the Nexus 9 to explore under HTC’s direction – with a significant leg up on Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered devices, which have also featured in the Nexus family, according to test benchmarks.
It remains unclear why Google chose a company with so little experience in tablets to manufacture its new flagship devices – especially as Samsung seems the more fitting choice from a hardware perspective, and a frequent Nexus partner. But Google has said that its range benefits from the broad range of manufacturers involved (and of course that helps to avoid criticisms of favouritism or conflict of interest within its Android partner portfolio).
The new tablet will also prove a nice platform to demonstrate Android L on, with the Nvidia K1 driving a refreshed UI experience. This is appropriate, since the Nexus range was primarily designed to act as a developer showcase for Android’s software capabilities. The first model was the Nexus One smartphone, launched in January 2010, and that has so far been HTC’s only involvement with the family. December 2010 saw the release of the Nexus S, manufactured by Samsung, and in November 2011 Samsung followed up with the Galaxy Nexus. Next came the Nexus 4 smartphone in November 2012, built by LG this time, and the first Nexus device to support wireless charging. After that, LG followed up with the Nexus 5 phone, which was released in October 2013.
A Nexus tablet range was also launched, starting with the affordable Nexus 7, built by Asus, in June 2012. The tablet family’s naming convention is a little more intuitive than that of the phones – the Nexus 7 featured a 7-inch screen and was followed by the premium Nexus 10 with its 10-inch 2560x1600p display, built by Samsung and released in October 2012. Asus unveiled the second generation Nexus 7 in July 2013, and Samsung is lining up a refresh of the Nexus 10 in the coming months.
But overall sales of the Nexus tablets have not been particularly encouraging for the flagship Android devices – although the Nexus 7 was responsible for a sharp rise in Asus’ profits, which bucked the industry trend in Q312 (Asus’ profits in that quarter rose 18% sequentially and 9% year-on-year on the back of the Nexus 7 launch).
Gartner put 2013 tablet sales at 195m units, with Android devices making up 62% of that figure. But Apple held the largest market share, with 36% (68.25m), and Samsung was in second place with 19.1% (37.25m). Asus took third place on 5.6% (10.92m), Amazon grabbed fourth with 4.8% (9.36m), and Lenovo was fifth with 3.3% (6.44m).
To put this in perspective, according to industry watcher Benedict Evan’s figures, Asus sold 5.35m tablets in 2H2012, while Apple sold 10m iPad Minis in the last two months of 4Q2012 alone, and 36.9m iPads in 2H2012. Evan also looked to Google Play’s development screen-size figures to estimate the number of active Nexus 7s and 10s – which use uncommon screen sizes. He estimated that as of April 2013 there were 6.8m Nexus 7s in use and only 680,000 Nexus 10s (on a 1% and 0.1% penetration of total devices connecting to the Google Play store). Evans admits that Google’s rounding to one decimal place could put the figures at any point between 3.88m – 10.12m and 346,800 – 1.01m respectively, but thought that the 6.8m Nexus 7 figure aligned nicely with Asus’s own figures.
The Nexus 9 will presumably sport a 9-inch screen, based on the naming scheme. The move is an attempt by HTC to move into new markets, including wearables, to shore itself up against declining handset sales. It remains to be seen whether the Nexus 9 will follow the Nexus 7’s WiFi and 4G connectivity or if it will take the WiFi-only approach favored by the Nexus 10.