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Ars dont seem to like it: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/pixel-c-review-new-hardware-ignores-an-android-tablets-core-problem-software/ http://arstechnic

by msh 11y ago

Ars dont seem to like it: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/pixel-c-review-new-hardware-ignores-an-android-tablets-core-problem-software/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/pixel-c-review-new-ha...

wyldfire 11y ago
> On Android today, nothing is built from the ground up for tablets. shrug, the two most common applications for me are the terminal and chrome. If I had a Pixel C, I'd load a linux distro on it and be pretty content.
- tdicola 11y ago
  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.
  - th0br0 11y ago
    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.
Analemma_ 11y ago
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.
- kuschku 11y ago
  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. - https://github.com/afollestad/material-dialogs https://github.com/afollestad/material-dialogs - https://github.com/mikepenz/MaterialDrawer https://github.com/mikepenz/MaterialDrawer - https://github.com/florent37/MaterialViewPager https://github.com/florent37/MaterialViewPager Many things, like a multi-pane preferences activity with AppBar, are not possible without hacks, reflection or access to internal com.android APIs either. And when Google provides support for something, it’s often lacking features, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/3vwpna/im_incensed_i_just_dont_understand_why_some/ https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/3vwpna/im_incen... or full of bugs http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30537413/textinputlayout-not-showing-edittext-hint-before-user-focus-on-it#answer-30608974 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30537413/textinputlayout-...
- amyjess 11y ago
  > 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.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    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.

by msh 11y ago

wyldfire 11y ago

> On Android today, nothing is built from the ground up for tablets. shrug, the two most common applications for me are the terminal and chrome. If I had a Pixel C, I'd load a linux distro on it and be pretty content.

tdicola 11y ago
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.
- th0br0 11y ago
  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.

Analemma_ 11y ago

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.

kuschku 11y ago
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. - https://github.com/afollestad/material-dialogs https://github.com/afollestad/material-dialogs - https://github.com/mikepenz/MaterialDrawer https://github.com/mikepenz/MaterialDrawer - https://github.com/florent37/MaterialViewPager https://github.com/florent37/MaterialViewPager Many things, like a multi-pane preferences activity with AppBar, are not possible without hacks, reflection or access to internal com.android APIs either. And when Google provides support for something, it’s often lacking features, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/3vwpna/im_incensed_i_just_dont_understand_why_some/ https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/3vwpna/im_incen... or full of bugs http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30537413/textinputlayout-not-showing-edittext-hint-before-user-focus-on-it#answer-30608974 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30537413/textinputlayout-...
amyjess 11y ago
> 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.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  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.