Gadgetory

we are in Mountain View California at Google's headquarters and the reason we're here is to get a look at the all-new pixel slate that's right Google is finally getting back into making tablets again but here's a question why now this is a pixel slate it is a tablet running Chrome OS made of course by Google so let's get into some of the hardware specs before we get really into what's going on with this thing so it is about seven millimeters thick it weighs about 1.6 pounds and just looking at the dimensions of this thing the nicest part about it is it's very well balanced like right in the center there so when you hold it it doesn't feel as big as these large 12 inch tablets usually feel there are two front facing speakers and they get very loud and they sound very good and there's a fingerprint sensor on the power button but the thing you really care about when you're looking at a tablet is the screen and this screen it's beautiful it is three K by 2 K which is 3000 pixels by 2,000 pixels I like this aspect ratio I think it really works and there's a lot of very advanced things about the way that this screen works that I'm not going to try and repeat here we're using a new technology that we built a custom design for that uses low temperature polycrystalline silicon to deliver much brighter much more rapid technically you're moving the electrons 100 times faster which is is to light up the screen much more efficiently other things note there are two USB C ports one on either side which is convenient if you want to plug in a power cord on either side or if you want to plug in you know two things into your tablet crazytown but you'll notice as I spin it around I see those two ports we see a keyboard connector on the bottom you know we don't see we don't see a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack one of the trends that we're really seeing is the advent of many more Bluetooth accessories particularly for audio with the phones leading the charge in terms of that transition and more people own those types of devices today and as a result they wanted-- a single product that they can use on both their devices I see so you figure everybody already went out and bought Bluetooth headphones because they had to offer their phone and so why not just make them use it with the tablet also and for compatibility we're including the adapter in the box pricing on this thing starts at $5.99 and that is for a version of this thing which has a Celeron processor four gigs of ram and 32 gigs of storage but you can price this thing all the way up to 1600 bucks which gets you a eighth-generation core i7 y series Intel processor 16 gigs of ram and 250 gigs of storage of course if you're gonna use this thing as your main work computer and you probably could you're gonna want a keyboard so Google has this thing which has been sitting down underneath it it is the pixel slate keyboard you open it up like this and then the back slides down into this little mode here and they put magnets on the back and there's a couple of strong ones on the top and on the bottom to lock it into those positions but you can also have it work at any of the angles in between which is pretty convenient but it's not great for a lap of ility so if you put it on your lap it can be a little bit wobbly because the keyboard doesn't lock up to the front of the tablet it's kind of a little bit wobbly here the other thing you might notice about the keyboard is hey it's backlit backlit keyboards on Chromebooks are disturbingly rare but this one's got it and also the keys are round which is an interesting design decision when we first saw the round keys we were a little skeptical but yeah and right now I like the way they look okay but we started doing user testing we did extensive user testing on between round keys and square keys and found that after a short learning curve users accuracy increased so the actual number of times that your finger can miss type by pressing multiple keys at the same time it's smaller because there's fewer places where there's overlap okay as for the rest of the hardware things it's got a couple of far-field microphones on the top it's got eight megapixel camera on the back and the front and the one on the front is wide-angle and apparently works really well in low light so you can do your video conferences in the dark now Google's made some interesting choices with the software on this so when you take it off of the keyboard it automatically jumps into a tablet mode so your stuff can go fullscreen but you can still you know around you can make and go halfsies screens here in this moat here but when you put it back into the keyboard and the magnet connects there it just jumps right back into the mode where you really control everything with the mouse and the touchpad so I haven't had its own time with the pixel sight obviously but I am impressed I am not feeling really limited by this thing at all as a tablet especially when there's a keyboard attached I am sure that I can be just as effective using this as I would be with a medium to high end pixel book which is kind of an achievement for a tablet and again as a tablet it is big it's a big tablet but there's something about it that doesn't feel quite as large as other tablets in this range it's a little bit lighter it's nowhere near as light as an iPad of course but it also runs a full desktop browser which the iPad doesn't so taking Chrome OS and making a tablet out of it was a really obvious thing for Google to do and so Google did the obvious thing and I haven't had a chance to really use it yet but I think they did a pretty good job of it I really can't wait to review it now if you've been watching my videos for any length of time you know that I just keep talking about the future of computing and I really don't feel like anybody's gotten the balance exactly right so the surface pro feels a little bit too PC like and the iPad feels a little bit too tablet like but this pixel slate it feels like it does a better job of striking that balance almost exactly 50/50 and I don't know if that's exactly what you want but it's fascinating that they've done such a good job making this thing feel so much like a tablet but also be able to do PC stuff we sink yeah we do need a slave yeah actually okay so you're making a tablet doing it you're making a slave why you making a slave you know over the years you know we started with clamshells but as we sort of saw where users are going you know touch became more important that's where we add a touch then we vote convertibles because people wanted the flexibility of having something they hold in their hand and be closer to them and then obviously slate is the next logical step there and it really is about flexibility for the end-user also just in general it is an important market so is Google done making Android tablets it's been a while and now you're making a robust tablet that happens run Android apps to be clear but is this is this the future of what you think big screen computing from Google should look like this is where we're investing from from a full-stop Productivity perspective we believe having a desktop full desktop browser is actually much better for the use cases you have on the web right eight years now we've been saying Android apps not so good on tablets yeah what do you think the state of that is how quickly like where do you think it's going yeah when we run Android apps on this thing but we've been working very closely with all the top app vendors and they have been doing a lot of optimizations right now whether it's Adobe for example has been optimizing a lot of their apps I think they're still again plenty of room for improvement but we're also doing things at the platform level to make it easier for app developer so that they don't have to even think about some of this stuff so that's everything we know so far about the pixel slave but I want to go back to that original question which is why did Google make this thing now well there's three points the first is that I think consumers are finally ready to accept this idea of a hybrid device we've been watching the iPad become more like a PC over the year and we've been watching the surface and you know go and the surface pro become more consumer friendly the second point is that Google had to do a lot of work to make Chrome OS is better on a tablet and it is way more usable in tablet mode now than it was the last time that we looked at it third and maybe most importantly Google had to get better at making Hardware they had to make those pixel phones they had to make the pixel book and a lot of the stuff that they've learned is built into the pixel slate and just it feels like a really nice kind of premium device so the answer to that question why now is really really simple Google was just ready do I wish that they had done it sooner yeah sure of course I do but you know what better slate than ever thanks so much for watching that was David Pearce from The Wall Street Journal I'm dieter bone from the verge obviously you should subscribe to the verge not to that guy over there over there wherever you went