Google Nexus 10 specs review: $400 to push 4 million pixels, are they PenTile?

If Google aimed to disturb Microsoft's big Windows Phone 8 launch event yesterday, the hurricane Sandy-induced cancellation of its own Nexus fiesta didn't prevent it from indeed doing so. It dumped the revelations about Android 4.2, Nexus 4, 7 and 10 minutes before the WP8 launch, making us all ADD kids go nuts for a good while where to focus first.

One release stood out, though, and this is Google's Nexus 10 tablet. While we knew everything about the Nexus 4, the mythical Samsung tablet with record resolution was more of a mystery. Apparently a direct reply to what Apple and Microsoft came up with in the tablet space going into the new holiday shopping season, Google saved its best for last - a 10" tablet built by Samsung with class-beating resolution and processor at a 25% discount to the competitors. Let's take a tour of the specs to gauge what can we expect from this tiger.

Design

While nobody expected a metal-clad tablet warrior out of Samsung, the materials and chassis design are certainly not aiming to grab any Red Dot design awards. In fact, Google's Matias Duarte says in the video below after the 10:40 mark that the design was targeted towards ergonomics and light weight from the get-go. 

He touts the goofy rounded shape that is now a Nexus hallmark, and the plastic construction with brushed metal finish, as the culprits for an extremely comfortable grip regardless of your wrist position, and the 603 grams of weight, which is truly something for a tablet with such monstrous spec sheet. These design decisions made the Nexus 10 thinner and lighter than the aluminum 4th generation iPad, despite the slightly larger display.

One design decision users might not be so on board with, however, is the lack of microSD card slot. We know these new Nexus devices are supposed to rely more on Google's cloud solutions now, but a media-consumption darling like what the Nexus 10 is shaping up to be will hardly make do with 16 GB of internal storage, and the 32 GB one is a full $100 more, taking a page from Apple's book. Of course, you can always connect a flash drive to it, but it's a nuisance nonetheless, which prevents the Nexus 10 from being the perfect Android slate.

Display

When we talk about perfect, the mind inevitably focuses on the display of this new Nexus tablet. Samsung has been teasing us with those 10" 2560x1500 pixels tablets since last year, and finally we are seeing them in a finished product. The Koreans didn't give us any hints that the Exynos 5250 board connected to a WQXGA panel they demoed for us at CES this year will end up being the poster child of Google's Nexus tablet line. That's probably because even then they didn't know Google will be approaching them to make one. 

Google's chief of partner engineering says in the video above that they look around what hardware partners can offer, find something they like, and go with it - in this case, they liked a 10" screen Samsung had that can surpass the new iPad's "Resolutionary" screen in terms of pixel density, and Sammy also had the hardware to push those pixels for a convenient combo deal.

Samsung showcased two 10" 2560x1600 panels at the FPD expo last year, one with the PLS-LCD technology plus the IGZO production method Apple got so fond of with its Sharp investment, and the other with an RGBW matrix arrangement, which is essentially a PenTile version for LCD screens, unlike the RGBG PenTile for AMOLEDs. The IGZO screen was still in development then, and Samsung said it didn't have any plans yet what to do with it, whereas the PenTile one was ready to go into mass production this year, so we'd assume that's what we have in the Nexus 10.

If so, then we might have an extra clear (white) pixel in an RGBW matrix arrangement, which increases backlight throughput, and allows for a very bright high-res screen with consumption similar to the regular 1280x800 10-inchers, as you can see in the power draw comparison of Samsung on the right. Sony does this with its WhiteMagic display type, which boosts brightness up to 900 nits in the Xperia P under direct sunlight, but color control is trickier on such screens, so we are curious what Samsung has achieved with the Nexus 10, if it used an RGBW matrix for it.

As for the pixel density hovering around the 300ppi mark, if we indeed have a PenTile arrangement, we'll know more after the display is put under the microscope on a subpixel level, but the official ppi count targets pixels, and is the highest of all tablets right now, which will resonate in the marketing materials.


Processor

Exynos 5250 board to WQXGA screen

The Nexus 10 is the first tablet to appear with a Cortex-A15 processor, which is the next generation of the ARM-based architecture that we have in current phones and tablets. Apple's A6 and Snapdragon's Krait cores might use some instruction sets from Cortex-A15, but the Samsung Exynos 5250 is the real deal, and its leaked benchmarks come to prove it.

We were pretty excited when Samsung wanted to show us its development board with the processor hooked up to a screen like the Nexus 10 one at CES, and now we have it in a retail device that sells for $399, not bad at all. It is still made with the 32nm production process like the Cortex-A9 Exynos 4412 in the Galaxy S III and Note II, so we can't expect it to be much more frugal than it, but what performance can we expect?

For starters, the Exynos 5250 in the Nexus 10 is paired with the Mali-T604 graphics processor, which is up to 4x faster than Mali-400 we have in current Samsung flagships, and renders 2.1 gigapixels per second with 12.8 GBps memory bandwidth, which you can imagine means flawless 3D games rendering and then some. 

The Cortex-A15 cores themselves are at 2 GHz up to 2x faster than comparable Cortex-A9 ones. The Nexus 10 processor is clocked at 1.7 GHz, so the difference might not be that big, but this will affect positively the battery life available from the huge 9,000 mAh unit in the tablet. Thus you can imagine that processor-intensive tasks like accelerated browsing with Chrome, or photo and video editing, might surpass anything we've seen so far on a mobile device.


When we add the other niceties, like 2 GB of RAM and the fast MIMO Wi-Fi, we might be willing to forget about the lack of memory card slot. Both Google and Samsung needed a fighter in the 10-inch tablet arena that is dominated by Apple's iPad, and where all the Windows 8/RT slates are primed to make inroads. Do you think they delivered a compelling argument now with the Nexus 10?