It looks quite nice, but personally I still think Surface still has the upper hand for (some) developers by offering a full blown OS where I am able to use Visual Studio and friends.
The tools available for coding on the go on Android like AIDE aren't as compelling to me.
Maybe that is something for an upcoming Android version.
Not that I have anything against Surface, but, despite all the effort, it still isn't a touch-first device. And Windows isn't a touch-first OS. IPad will vastly outsell it, and despite Google doing a crap job marketing Android to businesses, so will Android tablets. That's because Windows tablets have never been touch-first, and a great finger-touch UX is what characterizes mobile devices.
It's really cause no one wrote any Windows apps, and a lot of the ones that were written have been removed because the respective companies don't want to maintain them. The Kindle reader for my Windows Mobile phone was sooooo buggy.
If it had the apps to back it, Windows would have been okay as a touch OS. But that whole thing totally failed.
Microsoft should have put the Courrier table into production. It was ready to go. That one move totally killed any chance at Microsoft making it into the tablet realm (and really set them back 2 ~ 3 years as a consumer tech company)
> Microsoft should have put the Courrier table into production.
Yes, yes, yes. Like iOS and Android it would have been born a touch device. Killing Courier makes buying Nokia's handset business Ballmer's second worst decision.
What you describe is an "issue" I have with the Surface Pro 3: I always want to just use the physical keyboard. I eventually put Linux on it and I now use it as a normal laptop, using the touch input only occasionally (admittedly, support for touch within GNOME is worse than even Metro's efforts).
These hybrid touch devices that have "optional" keyboards can't seem to decide what they want to be, and I don't think this is actually a software problem in the case of Windows devices which seem capable enough in either "mode." Rather, I think if people are actually given the option of using a keyboard and a touchpad to do any non-trivial task, I expect most of them will do so. At which point... how is this tablet with a keyboard attached to it worth owning when one can get a small laptop?
Even at the height of my "Give Metro a Chance" phase with the SP3, relying exclusively on touch was at best a kind of awkward stopgap until I could position myself to use the physical keyboard. Sticking with touch only makes nothing easier, except in situations where your interactions with the device are limited by your physical surroundings.
Chromebooks, and thus presumably the Pixel C, ship a fully functional ssh client. It is therefore easy to connect to a linux box and do some development from the console.
I own a raspberry Pi to which I connect from my chromebook. I think it's a great combo. I'd totally buy a Pixel C but that would be unreasonable of me considering I bought my chromebook only few months ago.
I got a Surface 4 Pro. The problem I have with it is it's not a very good laptop in your laptop. Like putting on your lap and using it is very awkward for me. The kickstand barely bits on my legs. Everything else I liked but since I can't easily use the laptop on my lap...I returned it.
I'm also going to have to say that I'd rather own a Surface than this. Android is only useful for phones for me, there is nothing really compelling about Android on a tablet for me.
Disclosure: I own an Android tablet, I never use it.
My personal definition of full blown OS is something that considers me enough of an adult that it allows a file explorer / remote shell based file sync rather than use of a specific sync app or MTP.
Sad thing being that Android had that, and then it was taken away (my personal suspicion there is that it was done as part of an agreement with big media about content in the Play store).
This is a Tablet so it is vs Tablets not Surfaces (Which I personally consider a Surface a convertible) A tablet can't just mean has no keyboard to me.
Dieter Bohn and Walt Mossberg at the Verge weren't impressed either. Consensus seems to be that the hardware is solid, but tablet Android is still a mess. Worse, even if Google fixes the problems in the OS, there are (still!) virtually no 3rd-party apps that support tablet Android natively; they're all just blown-up phone apps. Not only does that ruin the experience but-- like Microsoft and their stalled phone ambitions-- it's not a problem Google can fix no matter how good their developers are. All the software patches in the world can't fix the issue of apathetic 3rd-party devs.
Thing is that Android apps, when properly made, should be able to go from phone to tablet without existing in different versions.
That at least was the idea back when they introduced the Fragments framework. there they took the existing activities concept and turned them into panes in a larger UI. Sadly the world quickly turned that into that "hamburger" bar.
Nor did it help that Apple, via the iPad launch, had gotten app devs to think about phones and tablets are separate spheres. Thus for a while there was "HD" apps popping up in the Play store that had the whole Fragments thing going, right alongside existing phone apps.
And then Google kinda abandoned the tablet world for a while, instead trying to pitch ChromeOS and Chromebooks as a corporate platform.
That didn't catch on so now they seem to be returning to Android tablets after doing some work on various things like multiple user accounts, and Android for Work that allows someone to have one app state for work and one for personal use on the same device.
Well, it doesn’t help that Google’s support libraries for developers are at best... bad looking. At worst, they are crashing with no way to find out what caused it.
1. AppCompat used to crash on device rotation with no clear error message on KitKat.
2. There are many third-party libraries that expand on what Google provides to allow devs to actually provide good-looking Material apps, from MaterialDialogs to MaterialDrawer to MaterialTabs.
Many things, like a multi-pane preferences activity with AppBar, are not possible without hacks, reflection or access to internal com.android APIs either.
> Worse, even if Google fixes the problems in the OS, there are (still!) virtually no 3rd-party apps that support tablet Android natively; they're all just blown-up phone apps. Not only does that ruin the experience but-- like Microsoft and their stalled phone ambitions-- it's not a problem Google can fix no matter how good their developers are.
Actually, with sufficient number of sufficient-quality developers, its a problem Google can solve fairly directly, by developing their own, compelling, Android tablet apps.
OTOH, I think that this is a problem that is overstated; Sure, there's lost of Android apps that are just "blown up" phone apps, but there's a lot of apps where there's no compelling need for something more, and "blown up" to tablet size improves interaction when you have a tablet available.
Its also not really like like Microsoft's problem.
> Not only does that ruin the experience but-- like Microsoft and their stalled phone ambitions-- it's not a problem Google can fix no matter how good their developers are. All the software patches in the world can't fix the issue of apathetic 3rd-party devs.
Hell, Google isn't even doing that much. Half of their apps don't have proper tablet UIs. How can third parties bother to do decent tablet apps if even the company who develops the platform doesn't care enough to do so? Google is in a leadership position, which means they have a responsibility to lead, and not only did they drop the ball, they threw an interception straight to Microsoft.
Since they started flogging Material the tablet-friendliness of Google apps has gone to crap.
Take the latest iterations of the Play store for instance. A while back they introduced a semi-floating search bar on the front view, that has the "hamburger" button integrated. Except that if you put a tablet into landscape, that bare stays fixed width, so now the burger button is suddenly not in the top right corner.
And i think Hangouts produce a single column down the middle with massive whitespaces on either side.
Edit: Thinking about it i wonder if this device is Google's attempt at dogfooding tablet development. Right now it seems that most of their apps are developed firstly for Apple devices.
It gets worse: Google's newest, most Material apps, like Inbox, have no tablet layouts. They are "blown up phone apps." Especially ironic (in an Alanis way, maybe?) because GMail is an exemplary app that shifts layout decisions based on screen size and orientation.
That said, Drive Docs, Slides, and Sheets are very nice on larger tablets. Still, Google needs to raise awareness that Android's APIs have very nice support for larger screens.
What's the actual real world experience of using Linux on an Android tablet though? I've looked into it briefly and you can do things in a chroot environment which has some limitations, or run a more vanilla Linux distribution that very likely has none of the drivers, power optimizations, etc. needed to make a usable mobile machine. It just seems like a horrible experience but I'd love to be proven wrong.
I've got a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (2014 Edition) and do quite like running a chrooted debian on it in combination with an Apple wireless keyboard.
SSHing into the Debian system gives me a fairly powerful development environment.
I've never tried running an Xserver on it though.
So, this is a device that could easily have been delivered with ChromeOS, but instead is running Android. In fact, I don't think the Pixel line has ever had an Android device, am I correct?
My gut is that rumors of ChromeOS's demise were not overblown, which is tough in my house -- all but one household computer runs on Chrome right now.
We'll see what the future brings, but I don't have faith that Android devices scaled up to desktop size are going to bring the same quality of experience my family gets right now with their Chromebooks.
> So, this is a device that could easily have been delivered with ChromeOS, but instead is running Android. In fact, I don't think the Pixel line has ever had an Android device, am I correct?
OTOH, Google has not ever released a device that was intended to operate without a keyboard and pointing device as a main interaction mode with ChromeOS. One of those
"not ever before" things was going to have to fail with with a Pixel tablet.
Honestly, I'm entirely unclear as to what "Pixel" as a brand is now (it used to be a brand-modifier in the Chromebook line), but branding without clear semantics is probably better than putting an OS that is less proven in a touch-first role on a tablet.
I have to mostly agree on this. I don't know why MS & Google feel the need to create a one OS fits all mentality. Some concepts just don't work for a tablet, phone or desktop. Some need to be different. I also don't like productivity with a touch screen... smudges and blurry parts of the screen don't work so well.
I've been a pretty big fan of ChromeOS... I only hope that the Android experience doesn't really destroy things here. On tablets, I find the android experience starts to break down a little, mostly in the system menus (slide down from top)... Other apps may or may not scale well. The GMail app does better than most, but some are just bad.
It's not easy to make an app that scales from all sizes/orientations, and this will just muddy things imho.
"Nexus" means this is an Android developed with a partner to be a developer device, and to have no crapware and punctual updates.
Android and ChromeOS are very different. Both will continue. In art because a ChromeOS touch device would be as bad at being touch-first as a Windows device. Ne'er the twain shall meet.
Then there's "Google Play Edition" which is... what? Nexus-ish?
And "Silver." And "One."
Did they hire the people from Sun who thought up *beans? Or maybe Microsoft's technology branding guru?
Android is a hit with youth, and the less technical interface compared to the desktop is very welcome to older generations and those who are less technically saavy. Believe it or not, there are many people out there who still struggle with a mouse. Though ChromeOS supports touch, the apps they run generally are built around a mouse, whereas Android apps are ALWAYS built around touch.
Also note that the 6.0.1 update for Android introduced a slightly different tablet UI again.
Since 4.3-4.4, tablets have sported a bottom bar with 3 buttons centered. Now two of them (back and home) are found in the bottom left corner, while the "switcher" button has landed in the bottom right.
While this seem to be nice when holding a tablet with both hands, it also works well with "Fitts' law" as corners are easy to hit with a mouse.
Hmm - no SD port, and single USB-C and only comes in 32 or 64GB... I assume Google isn't intending for you to be offline with this device for extended periods.
Well you really should not be surprised about Google pushing for online all the time, app store, cloud services. It's the same business model as them, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon all set their sights on a few years ago.
"Run powerful apps and the latest games. Pixel C has an NVIDIA X1 processor and loads of graphics horsepower. Under the hood, you’ll also find over 10 hours of battery life to keep you going strong."
How much graphics horsepower does ChromeOS needs? On the 10 hours of battery life, I would have expected more for a, more or less, one application OS.
A premium 10" Android slate sounds nice enough, especially with multi-window on the way, but that keyboard breaks the deal. No pipe key or escape? Good luck doing any serious programming. Also, if running a lightweight OS, I would really expect 2-day battery life for the big price.
Gnome was exploring touch too. For my use case, though, a window manager is superfluous, as I'd use this machine as my portable emacs. At 150 bucks it's way cheaper than any other option. All I need is Emacs and Firefox anyway.
Oh dear... the Nexus Q reborn in tablet form as the Pixel C.
From the moment they mentioned it was Android a few months ago [1] I had my doubts about the "vision" driving this product, and now after reading what Arstechnica and the Verge have to say I feel genuinely bad for the engineers who worked on this. It looks like a lot of love was expended, and then maybe schedules pushed out whatever the heck this half baked thing is.
Lack of software. Or at least lack of high-quality software for getting real work done. I had an Android tablet for a while. It was nicely portable, had good battery life, could do a lot of things well, but I just couldn't find any apps I liked for two things I do often: ssh and creating presentations. One ssh app could do tunnels, but got all confused if I tried to open multiple terminal sessions. Another handled multiple sessions OK, but couldn't do tunnels. Then the two would interfere with one another if I tried to run both simultaneously. For presentations, many couldn't do something as basic as keep track of where my cursor was, and would add text at the wrong place. Others at least worked, but couldn't do anything more complex than a bullet list. A real email app would have been nice, but I had to use both home and work webmail (which are very different) instead. From what I can tell, all of this has only gotten a tiny bit better in the last couple of years. It would be great if there were more Android developers coming from the desktop space instead of the phone space, producing more desktop-like apps, but that doesn't seem to be the case. As long as that continues to be the case, using Android on one's primary machine will continue to be frustrating.
ChromeOS, on the other hand, seems to be in better shape. I'm seriously debating with myself about whether to get a regular Pixel (not Pixel C) as my next main computer.
ChromeOS needs a good general mail client as well, there's been some work in this space, but from what I've seen it's still not there yet. I actually like GMail for general email... though account switching with more than 2-3 accounts is a pain.
Yes, obviously it's a chicken and egg problem. Once they sell 100,000,000 "desktop" devices that'll change. The reason Microsoft Windows destroyed everyone else was because you couldn't get quality software for most other computers. Windows Phone can't gain traction because it lacks quality software, for example. The problem is that software rarely comes first.
In short, if enough people overlook Android's shortcomings, it'll eventually reach a tipping point.
Can't speak for GP, but it's an embarassment that in 2015, Android still doesn't have built-in multi-window support. For crying out loud, even Apple beat Google to this, and they're typically behind when it comes to these things.
If it's like other Google Android devices, you're free to install a custom bootloader and other (Linux) OSes. None seem to have as good touch UI support as Android or perhaps Ubuntu Touch, though.
The tools available for coding on the go on Android like AIDE aren't as compelling to me.
Maybe that is something for an upcoming Android version.