Gadgetory

hey what is up guys I'm poppy HD here and this is the Google pixel slate this tablet it was announced alongside the pixel 3 back in October I ordered one then it didn't ship for a couple weeks it was a little bit delayed but now I've got my and this thing has made me so sad and confused and curious but mostly sad like if I was doing a tablet award show also for 2018 this one would most likely end up getting the toilet bowl trophy bust of the year here's why so whenever a new tech product comes out and it's a letdown obviously that's a disappointment for everyone but it's an even bigger disappointment when the expectations and the potential were sky-high so that's like something what happened with the phone bust of the year the red hydrogen I'm someone who likes a lot of red products I respect what they do they announce they're coming out with a new product that's a phone my expectations are way up here the phone comes out it's really bad then that Delta between what I expected and what we got was just drastic that's what's happening again here with the pixel slate so when the iPad pro came out earlier this year I thought like wow this is gonna be really hard for anything to beat this the iPad already had this huge lead over every other tablet and I just took another huge step forward with this build and this incredible performance like how can anything else measure up there are other tablets of course that do other things well but none of them really touch the iPad as far as usability but then pixels sleep just kind of loomed on the horizon so when I finally got mine I was really pumped and I want to give it a shot at possibly taking over all of my tablet use like maybe this will be just as fun to use as the iPad pro maybe even more fun because it has a few key advantages like right off the bat any first impression of a device starts out the box with the aesthetics and this is a solid looking tablet it's almost matte black it's this sort of dark matte blue all the way around there's almost no logos which is took a subtle classic G in the corner and it's a pretty symmetrical and balanced no camera bump at all that's a good start and the more I looked into this the more I remember all these reasons that Google is telling me back in October why this is going to be the dopest laptop tablet convertible and to me I don't know possibly better than the iPad pro so it has a pair of stereo front-facing speakers just like back in the Nexus 10 days so audio is actually facing towards me and I can pretty much never accidentally block them and the sound turns out is pretty good it's got volume it's full it's great for a tablet and then the display is by far the flagship piece of this hardware it's not a hundred twenty Hertz but everything else about it is super high-end it's a three thousand by two thousand twelve point three inch display so a little taller than sixteen by nine and plenty sharp it's called a molecular display I don't know what I have to name everything but they do the point is its super crisp this is the max brightness it's not very bright but it's still indoors plenty fine and really good looking for watching shows and videos and things like that and then there were even smaller things like the i/o there are two USB C ports one on each side either one can be used to plug into charge and you can plug in both at the same time if you want to one for charging and one for some accessory and even the power button on the side doubles as a fingerprint reader so no need for face unlock but basically every time you hit the button you're already securely unlocked and then it has these smart pins at the bottom that work perfectly with this incredible pixel slate accessory that I think is objectively better than Apple's the keyboard so the slate sort of slaps into this keyboard at the connector and then there are enough magnets in both the tablet and the folio the case itself that you can connect it to prop up the back and once they're connected it's literally any angle instead of just some set number of fixed angles and on top of that it has Chrome OS which on paper is a nice combo of Chrome for all your web stuff plus the Play Store for all these Android apps all in one place and the USB C ports that can actually read accessories like SD cards and storage drives so proper power users paradise so I was pumped about all of this like my expectations are really high there's a lot of great hardware maybe this will unhook me from the iPad pro and be just as good then I used it and pretty much all of that went directly out the window welcome to lag city population pixel slate you might remember I I didn't show my first impressions of the pixel slate in my video where I went to Google before then build a pixel 3 and that was because I literally thought there's no way it's this bad and it's pre-production software and I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and I didn't show it on camera and I just did a pixel 3 first impressions but I did see this in pre-production mode but now that they're shipping it like this it's this is it it's almost unbelievable this is real-time the animation for multitasking legitimately takes several seconds and it's everywhere scrolling is not fast loading pretty much anything is slow I feel like this whole UI runs at like 12 to maybe 20 frames per second usually pinch-to-zoom and pretty much anything but especially in web browsing is usually lag city it's just not fun and like no matter how many features you throw in here no matter how powerful Chrome OS can be I'll never be able to use this tablet long enough to even discover half of that stuff because it's just really not fun I've been trying to force myself to use this tablet for the past couple days on and off messing with apps flipping back and forth between web apps and native apps and doing some writing and watching videos etc but I never really got very far because within minutes I'm just sitting there and noted how much lag and choppiness there is everywhere and of course that is a stark contrast basically the opposite of what makes the iPad pro so fun to use which is the excessive effortless and smooth performance thanks to that a 12x Bionic it's massively powerful so I'm thinking a lot of that has to do with the spec I bought this is the baseline model so 600 bucks so it is cheaper than the iPad pro and for that money you get four gigs of ram 32 gigs of internal storage and an internal Intel Celeron processor which you know that's probably a bottleneck so if I give them that benefit of the doubt I'd have to spend about 800 bucks which is the same as iPad pro money just to get out of Celoron world or maybe I should have gone with the i-5 but for Chrome OS I like really they shouldn't either way they shouldn't ship this one this is so sad honestly and I had a lot of hope but I literally haven't been able to force myself to use it long enough to dive into the more niche features or really test the battery life or any of that because none of that stuff even matters if at the surface it's borderline unusable the good news if you want any is this is all software and in theory it can all be fixed in the blink of an eye with a software update and I've seen good products get better but not a lot of terrible things get to be great so the chances of this tablet becoming incredible are pretty low but let me just say this isn't a completely useless tablet it does have some upsides that I survived long enough to notice Chrome OS for example lets you connect straight to your Android phones so when I'm connected to my pixel it can tether automatically and use my phone's data when there's no Wi-Fi and it has a messages app so they sync up and I can get texts on the tablet and reply it without picking up my phone it's basically just like apples sweet the AI at the top trying to predict what you'll do next or what app you'll open next is actually pretty good unlike some others and with Chrome since it's straight up a web browser you can go split screen with multiple tabs in multiple windows it's still extremely slow and annoying but if you know that the features are here you can take advantage of this and honestly this thing does much better as a laptop than it does as a free-standing tablet that now that requires buying the optional 200 dollar keyboard accessory which is not cheap but it is really good this thing first of all is made of much more premium materials I've hated the fingerprinting rubber Apple uses for a while this one's soft touch it's fabric on the outside and the magnet is stronger and once you connect it the magnets stay stuck to the metal so you have your infinite angles for adjustment instead of just two or three literally just by sliding it up and down it has more specialized function keys that work specifically in Chrome OS so brightness media multitasking there's a Google assistant button and the keys themselves have way more travel so they're better for people who like to type for a little while the keys are freaking backlit so you can see them in the dark and there's a trackpad and mouse so it's basically a whole laptop action happening there's two fingers scrolling the whole deal obviously something I really missed on the iPad I could even go so far as to say the pixel slate with this really good keyboard accessory is closer to replacing an actual everyday laptop then the iPad pro is with its keyboard accessory there'll be a bold thing to say but I could say it but without this keyboard if you were planning on using this as your daily tablet this ain't it chief this is not the move do not spend $600 on this my advice would be give a shot for the the i5 or i7 versions of it maybe performance will be better and you can use it more often as a laptop or if you only have that six hundred bucks to spend just get an iPad so that's pretty much it a sad story but that's the truth thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace