Google Says The Nexus 9 LTE Works On Verizon—A Year Later, It Still Doesn’t

If you go to the Google Store’s Nexus 9 page, you’ll see that it clearly shows Verizon compatibility for the tablet’s LTE variant. The problem is that this claim simply isn’t true. Last December, a thread was started on XDA regarding the issue, in which a few people showed that putting a Verizon SIM into the tablet made it exhibit some rather odd behavior. Specifically: it didn’t work. Over a year after launch, there is still no fix. After some extensive testing, it appears this probably isn’t Verizon’s fault, but more likely a software or hardware issue that needs to be resolved by Google, HTC, or Qualcomm.

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While the tablet contains all the necessary CDMA and LTE bands, something funny happens when you actually put a Verizon SIM into the Nexus 9 LTE. It refuses to register on the network, the radio turns off, and a lot of times you get an SMS message saying the MEID is empty and the device can’t be used.

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Here is a video showing exactly what happens when this device meets Big Red:

Perhaps the most ironic part of all of this is that Verizon has actually whitelisted the Nexus 9 LTE in its activation system. There’s no problem with walking into a store and getting a SIM card for it, and it’ll show up on your Verizon account as “QA-HTC-T1-0P82300-4.0.” We have reached out to Google for a comment on this and will update should we get one.

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