Gadgetory

I don't know if you've noticed but it seems like everybody's trying to do something new with tablets this year and Google's getting in on the act too they're actually making their own tablet for the first time and it's this good-looking little guy the pixels see so how is this Android tablet different from all the other new tablets out there well first off its made by Google's pixel team which means it looks like a Chromebook pixel it has great design thick aluminum straight edges and a sense of monolithic ruggedness you can even tap on the top to check your battery life it is a little thick about a quarter of an inch but I don't really mind that though because I'm on team battery and so far I haven't had any problem using the pixel C all day long but really what sets is $499 Android tablet of heart is that you can get this $149 Android keyboard to go with it it's actually really impressive feat of Engineering once you figure out how it all fits together the keyboard is bluetooth but I connect up to a tablet with a really strong magnet and an even stronger hinge so you have a full 90 degrees of angles to use it at when you close it all up the tablet wirelessly charges a keyboard so you never even have to plug the thing in and this is one of the better Bluetooth keyboards I've ever used Google actually eliminated a few of the keys on the left and right edge which means that the ones remaining can be a little bit bigger it's not quite a full sized keyboard but the keys that you actually type on are big enough and deep enough to let you jam along at speed so those are the tricks and the specs are pretty good too it has a high resolution 10.2 inch screen and to really loud speakers it's got three gigs of RAM and a fairly speedy and Vidia processor there's even an array of four microphones up top so you can bark okay Google from across the room and have it respond to your commands so Google's hardware team is clearly ready for the future of tablet computing but Google's Android and developer teams they just can't keep up the pixel C runs Android 6.0 marshmallow and Android needs some serious help when it comes to being productive on tablets there's no way to do split-screen with any app and now that Windows iOS and even Samsung are doing it it seems like a really stupid thing to be missing that's even weirder because the pixel has an aspect ratio of the square root of 2 on the screen which is theoretically perfect for cutting it in half and painting that same ratio and I could even forgive all that if it weren't for the fact that there are little delays when I tap the screen to jump between apps and sometimes even within apps if you have to go one app at a time it needs to be really fast switching between them and it's just not it seems like there's just more optimization work to be done here even this fancy keyboard sometimes has issues communicating with Android sometimes I get missed or even repeating key presses it doesn't get better inside most apps because very few of them take advantage of the tablet size even some of Google's own apps feel like just wide expanses of wasted space heck even Google Docs seems to think that I'm on a phone it has this new research feature but it slits a screen vertically instead of horizontally I could look past all of that if I knew that apps from third-party developers were optimized with tablets but basically none of them are in fact a lot of them including really popular stuff like slack Instagram and Twitter they throw up screens that kick you into portrait mode even when the keyboard is attached in landscape it's infuriating at the end of the day I just don't know what the pixel see is trying to be maybe it's a development platform for Google employees whatever it is it's certainly not something that most people should buy at six hundred and fifty bucks for the whole package you can find way way better value by going with another tablet so the pixel team may have done a pretty good job here of rethinking what an Android tablet could be but until the rest of Google puts more thought into making Android better on tablets just engineering great hardware isn't enough