The Nexus 9 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0 may be two plastic-clad tablets but they come equipped with excellent specs that give users the best value for their money. Here is how these two devices from Google and Samsung compare.

Design

The Nexus 9 was manufactured by HTC for Google. It relies on matte plastic to keep its cost down but it does have a metal band running along its edge that gives it a premium feel when it is held. The Tab A 8.0, though entirely made of plastic, is well designed. As for colors, the comes in three colors, sand, white and black while the Tab A 8.0 is available in white, titanium and blue.

Display

The display on the Tab A 8.0 makes use of a TFT screen measuring 8.0 with a resolution of 768 x 1024 pixels and a density of 160 pixels per inch while the Nexus 9 has a better quality IPS LCD screen measuring 8.9 inches with a resolution of 1536 x 2048 pixels and density of 281 pixels per inch.

Specs

In terms of hardware, the Nexus 9 has a better Nvidia Tegra K1 chipset, a Denver CPU with two cores clocked at 2.3 GHz and a Kepler DX1 GPU. The Tab A 8.0 relies on a Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU with four cores clocked at 1.2GHz

Memory

When it comes to memory slots, the Nexus is at a disadvantage as it does not come with the feature. The version on the Tab A 8.0, however, can be used to add up to 128 GB of external storage. As for RAM, the 16 GB Tab A 8.0 has 1.5 GB and its 32GB model has 2 GB; the Nexus 9 has 2 GB.

Camera

The Tab A 8.0 has a 5 megapixel camera while the Nexus 9's rear camera is 8 megapixels.

Price

The price of the Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0 hovers around $230 depending on various online retail sites while the Nexus 9 costs around $400.