7 ms·

Revisiting the Google Pixel C – Better, but Not There Yet

bigtones 11y ago
An interesting story. Ars Technica [1] dug up a few months ago the the Pixel C was never meant to run Android - all the way through designed and development it was tested with the Chrome OS loaded. At the last minute, the now unified Android / Chrome OS team decided to switch it to Android as a flagship device of their new Android direction and phasing out of Chrome OS in favor of Android. Result was a mess and probably the crappiest device Google has ever shipped, which anandtech rightfully pointed out. [1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/the-pixel-cs-bumpy-road-from-chrome-os-concept-to-android-adoptee/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/the-pixel-cs-bumpy-ro...
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Not so much dug up as (wildly) speculated based on circumstantial data.
- AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
  A ChromeOS tablet probably would've been a better end-product as far as a productivity tablet goes. The problem is that ChromeOS's app selection is pitiful for entertainment apps, and I suppose Google figured that no one would pay $500 for a "premium" productivity tablet when a cheap clamshell Chromebook would work nearly as well.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    That has been Google's problem ever since ChromeOS went from being a "can it work?" research project to something they wanted to monetize. If you look at the timeline, Android was poised to go "productive" with the 3.x for tablets. But at that very time the first Chromebooks hit the market, and the push was strongly towards the corporate (their unveiling even had a demo of Citrix client support). I can't help speculate that there was some backroom jousting between Rubin (Android) and Pichai (ChromeOS) about who should carry the corporate push, with Pichai winning and Rubin moving to X-labs. It seems that Google has renewed their focus on productive Android recently though, in large part thanks to incorporating Samsung's Knox tech and such. This likely because even though ChromeOS is a lovely "terminal", its not a phone platform. Bascially the corporate world lacks a proper upgrade path from Windows CE/Mobile that has been powering all manner of mobile devices. Going Android would allow quite a bit of flexibility, and choice in equipment suppliers. It would not surprise me that as with the previous Pixel, the Pixel C is as much for Google internal use as it is for retail. As i recall, the Chromebook Pixel was in part a push to provide an alternative to Macbooks for Google employees (i swear that Google may well be Apple's biggest corporate customer, possibly tied with Facebook).
    - whatusername 11y ago
      Don't forget IBM in the list of apples corporate customers.
nextos 11y ago
I believe this would be a fantastic Linux machine. But sadly with all the closed components it's not trivial to get an ARM distro running, despite Coreboot.
- gh02t 11y ago
  They're based around a Tegra X1 SoC aren't they? I know Nvidia releases Linux for their X1 devkits ( https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/linux-tegra https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/linux-tegra ). Dunno what else is in the Pixel-C hardware wise, but at least that gives me some hope. I'd consider buying one if you could put a real Linux distro on it.
  - nextos 11y ago
    Yes, let's see. It's really nice hardware. The only slight annoyance is the lack of some standard keys. Perhaps Surface 3 (non-pro) could be a good alternative. It's x86, but getting Linux running there is tricky too. [1] [1] http://reddit.com/r/surfacelinux http://reddit.com/r/surfacelinux
- dezgeg 11y ago
  Nope, Tegra X1 support for the mainline Linux is already being done as we speak (by NVIDIA themselves): http://www.spinics.net/lists/devicetree/msg109053.html http://www.spinics.net/lists/devicetree/msg109053.html
  - nextos 11y ago
    Great, I'm glad to be proven wrong. I asked on #coreboot and people were quite pessimistic.
- dharma1 11y ago
  People are running Ubuntu on Nvidia Shield TV (Tegra X1) and tablet (Tegra K1). Nvidia has L4T (Linux for Tegra) officially, since they want to push the Tegra boards to robotics etc, where people of course want to run a full Linux. CUDA compatible too which is nice. I think there will be an X1 powered tablet from Nvidia this year, hopefully priced better than the Pixel C
Synaesthesia 11y ago
So they fixed the issues of touches not responding and maybe some of the worst unexpected crashing, but the major issues remain like almost all apps still being built for phone sizes, lack of multitasking and the fact that most apps only run in portrait mode, all of which are really not acceptable on 10" tablets.
- nathanasmith 11y ago
  I follow you on everything else but >> most apps only run in portrait mode What? That's not even remotely true. I think out of the hundred or so apps I have on my Android tablet, there might be one that is stuck in portrait mode.
  - Synaesthesia 11y ago
    My apology this is what I inferred from reading review of it, on The Verge: "It gets worse with third-party apps. The Pixel C wants to be used in landscape mode, but too many apps assume that they’re on phones. Popular apps like Slack, Twitter, and many more toss you into portrait mode even when the keyboard is attached." From Ars Technica: "A new entry of late is the "pillarboxed phone app," which is made by designers that see the above issue and say "No problem! We'll put big margins on the left and right of the screen! It's a tablet app now!"
    - josteink 11y ago
      Issues like this with one of the first Android tablets/netbook-convertibles (the TF101, running original Honeycomb 3.0) drove me to develop this app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.kjonigsen.straitjacket https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.kjonigsen.... I see from the discussion here that it is obviously still needed.
jbk 11y ago
I'm probably stupid, but I honestly don't understand this device and Google startegy... It's called Pixel instead of Nexus, (it's running Android), so it's confusing to many people, on the market positioning side... At the same time, on the technical side, Android team, after telling us to use Fragments to have nice tablets+phone experience for a few years, seems to not care about fragments anymore. Notably appcompat and design libraries don't work correctly in Fragments anymore... And the Google apps show this very clearly. If Google apps are not supporting tablets correctly, why should we?
- AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
  The original Google Pixel was so named for the following reasons: 1) It was developed in-house at Google 2) It reflected the hi-DPI of the screen. Evidently they decided to turn "Pixel" into a brand, and I suppose they figured that the in-house tablet they developed warranted the title (if you look at the thing, its aluminum design does resemble the panel half of a Chromebook Pixel). So I suppose they now use the Pixel brand to either represent that style or to indicate that it's in-house hardware.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Also the Chromebook Pixel may have been an attempt to get Google employees to use something other than Macbooks. Meaning that it may be in part aimed at dogfooding the Android platform internally, much like how Microsoft employees run beta version of their software to root out early bugs and such. Also offering the device for sale may provide some means of covering the expense of having them made, as usually factories demand certain minimum amount ordered before they start a production run.
    - arthurfm 11y ago
      > Also the Chromebook Pixel may have been an attempt to get Google employees to use something other than Macbooks. I think it's most likely due to Apple's weak enterprise management tools for OS X [1] and the mid-2009 cyber attack on Google (Operation Aurora [2]) which was the result of one or more Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerabilities. [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/27/google_mac_support/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/27/google_mac_support/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
modeless 11y ago
> Android itself still has issues with responsiveness and latency that bother me > Chrome in particular is really bad regarding responsiveness and latency This can't be emphasized enough. The Android and Chrome teams should be absolutely ashamed of the current state of performance. On my Nexus 5X I regularly have to wait 5 full seconds or more after pressing the app switcher or home buttons before I can perform another action, while animations chug and jank. Screen transitions within apps are often delayed multiple seconds before starting. Launching apps like Twitter or Facebook or Google Maps sometimes takes 10 seconds or more. Scrolling in every app is constantly interrupted by multiple missed frames as new items load. Loading websites like The Verge is just a terrible experience as the whole page jumps up and down for many seconds while scrolling is completely impossible. It's infuriating.
- bacro 11y ago
  This. 10000 times this. I really, really hope that Windows 10 wins this battle. It provides the best of both worlds. We can have snappy performance (iOS) while having access to the file system.
  - mchahn 11y ago
    > while having access to the file system. Android has easy access to the file system. You can download one of many file managers.
    - bacro 11y ago
      What I meant was that Windows can have the good parts of both iOS and Android. To be clear: it can run as smooth as iOS while letting me access the file system as Android does. Another rant on Android: Developing apps for it is so bad... The guy that thought it was a good idea to destroy and recreate an Activity's after orientation changes should be fired. iOS's approach is 10000 times easier and faster EDIT: Corrected when I said Activity's UI was destroyed to the Activity itself
- jordanthoms 11y ago
  Completely agree with all your points, especially with Chrome. This is one reason I'm still hoping the Chrome OS / Android merge will take more from the Chrome OS side as the performance there is great. One thing to check though - do you have _any_ accessibility services enabled (Lastpass is a common one). They absolutely murder performance and since turning Lastpass off my 6P is far from perfect but much better than it was.
itsjoesullivan 11y ago
Picked one of these up last week. Sending it back this week. Had I known the current state of the Android tablet experience, I would have been more upset when ChromeOS lost the Pixel team.
pluma 11y ago
As a content Android user (don't own or plan to own a single iOS device though I have used iPads at work) and I replaced my Nexus 7 (2013) with the Pixel C. So far my only criticism has been the price tag. The keyboard is pretty much mandatory to get the full experience and with the keyboard and two spare cables I ended up with ~€800 for the whole package. Yes, some apps can get laggy (more so than they should) and it's good to see the firmware is getting some updates but it's far from "completely dysfunctional".

An interesting story. Ars Technica [1] dug up a few months ago the the Pixel C was never meant to run Android - all the way through designed and development it was tested with the Chrome OS loaded. At the last minute, the now unified Android / Chrome OS team decided to switch it to Android as a flagship device of their new Android direction and phasing out of Chrome OS in favor of Android. Result was a mess and probably the crappiest device Google has ever shipped, which anandtech rightfully pointed out. [1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/the-pixel-cs-bumpy-road-from-chrome-os-concept-to-android-adoptee/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/the-pixel-cs-bumpy-ro...

digi_owl 11y ago
Not so much dug up as (wildly) speculated based on circumstantial data.
AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
A ChromeOS tablet probably would've been a better end-product as far as a productivity tablet goes. The problem is that ChromeOS's app selection is pitiful for entertainment apps, and I suppose Google figured that no one would pay $500 for a "premium" productivity tablet when a cheap clamshell Chromebook would work nearly as well.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  That has been Google's problem ever since ChromeOS went from being a "can it work?" research project to something they wanted to monetize. If you look at the timeline, Android was poised to go "productive" with the 3.x for tablets. But at that very time the first Chromebooks hit the market, and the push was strongly towards the corporate (their unveiling even had a demo of Citrix client support). I can't help speculate that there was some backroom jousting between Rubin (Android) and Pichai (ChromeOS) about who should carry the corporate push, with Pichai winning and Rubin moving to X-labs. It seems that Google has renewed their focus on productive Android recently though, in large part thanks to incorporating Samsung's Knox tech and such. This likely because even though ChromeOS is a lovely "terminal", its not a phone platform. Bascially the corporate world lacks a proper upgrade path from Windows CE/Mobile that has been powering all manner of mobile devices. Going Android would allow quite a bit of flexibility, and choice in equipment suppliers. It would not surprise me that as with the previous Pixel, the Pixel C is as much for Google internal use as it is for retail. As i recall, the Chromebook Pixel was in part a push to provide an alternative to Macbooks for Google employees (i swear that Google may well be Apple's biggest corporate customer, possibly tied with Facebook).
  - whatusername 11y ago
    Don't forget IBM in the list of apples corporate customers.

nextos 11y ago

I believe this would be a fantastic Linux machine. But sadly with all the closed components it's not trivial to get an ARM distro running, despite Coreboot.

gh02t 11y ago
They're based around a Tegra X1 SoC aren't they? I know Nvidia releases Linux for their X1 devkits ( https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/linux-tegra https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/linux-tegra ). Dunno what else is in the Pixel-C hardware wise, but at least that gives me some hope. I'd consider buying one if you could put a real Linux distro on it.
- nextos 11y ago
  Yes, let's see. It's really nice hardware. The only slight annoyance is the lack of some standard keys. Perhaps Surface 3 (non-pro) could be a good alternative. It's x86, but getting Linux running there is tricky too. [1] [1] http://reddit.com/r/surfacelinux http://reddit.com/r/surfacelinux
dezgeg 11y ago
Nope, Tegra X1 support for the mainline Linux is already being done as we speak (by NVIDIA themselves): http://www.spinics.net/lists/devicetree/msg109053.html http://www.spinics.net/lists/devicetree/msg109053.html
- nextos 11y ago
  Great, I'm glad to be proven wrong. I asked on #coreboot and people were quite pessimistic.
dharma1 11y ago
People are running Ubuntu on Nvidia Shield TV (Tegra X1) and tablet (Tegra K1). Nvidia has L4T (Linux for Tegra) officially, since they want to push the Tegra boards to robotics etc, where people of course want to run a full Linux. CUDA compatible too which is nice. I think there will be an X1 powered tablet from Nvidia this year, hopefully priced better than the Pixel C

Synaesthesia 11y ago

So they fixed the issues of touches not responding and maybe some of the worst unexpected crashing, but the major issues remain like almost all apps still being built for phone sizes, lack of multitasking and the fact that most apps only run in portrait mode, all of which are really not acceptable on 10" tablets.

nathanasmith 11y ago
I follow you on everything else but >> most apps only run in portrait mode What? That's not even remotely true. I think out of the hundred or so apps I have on my Android tablet, there might be one that is stuck in portrait mode.
- Synaesthesia 11y ago
  My apology this is what I inferred from reading review of it, on The Verge: "It gets worse with third-party apps. The Pixel C wants to be used in landscape mode, but too many apps assume that they’re on phones. Popular apps like Slack, Twitter, and many more toss you into portrait mode even when the keyboard is attached." From Ars Technica: "A new entry of late is the "pillarboxed phone app," which is made by designers that see the above issue and say "No problem! We'll put big margins on the left and right of the screen! It's a tablet app now!"
  - josteink 11y ago
    Issues like this with one of the first Android tablets/netbook-convertibles (the TF101, running original Honeycomb 3.0) drove me to develop this app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.kjonigsen.straitjacket https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.kjonigsen.... I see from the discussion here that it is obviously still needed.

jbk 11y ago

I'm probably stupid, but I honestly don't understand this device and Google startegy... It's called Pixel instead of Nexus, (it's running Android), so it's confusing to many people, on the market positioning side... At the same time, on the technical side, Android team, after telling us to use Fragments to have nice tablets+phone experience for a few years, seems to not care about fragments anymore. Notably appcompat and design libraries don't work correctly in Fragments anymore... And the Google apps show this very clearly. If Google apps are not supporting tablets correctly, why should we?

AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
The original Google Pixel was so named for the following reasons: 1) It was developed in-house at Google 2) It reflected the hi-DPI of the screen. Evidently they decided to turn "Pixel" into a brand, and I suppose they figured that the in-house tablet they developed warranted the title (if you look at the thing, its aluminum design does resemble the panel half of a Chromebook Pixel). So I suppose they now use the Pixel brand to either represent that style or to indicate that it's in-house hardware.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Also the Chromebook Pixel may have been an attempt to get Google employees to use something other than Macbooks. Meaning that it may be in part aimed at dogfooding the Android platform internally, much like how Microsoft employees run beta version of their software to root out early bugs and such. Also offering the device for sale may provide some means of covering the expense of having them made, as usually factories demand certain minimum amount ordered before they start a production run.
  - arthurfm 11y ago
    > Also the Chromebook Pixel may have been an attempt to get Google employees to use something other than Macbooks. I think it's most likely due to Apple's weak enterprise management tools for OS X [1] and the mid-2009 cyber attack on Google (Operation Aurora [2]) which was the result of one or more Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerabilities. [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/27/google_mac_support/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/27/google_mac_support/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora

modeless 11y ago

> Android itself still has issues with responsiveness and latency that bother me > Chrome in particular is really bad regarding responsiveness and latency This can't be emphasized enough. The Android and Chrome teams should be absolutely ashamed of the current state of performance. On my Nexus 5X I regularly have to wait 5 full seconds or more after pressing the app switcher or home buttons before I can perform another action, while animations chug and jank. Screen transitions within apps are often delayed multiple seconds before starting. Launching apps like Twitter or Facebook or Google Maps sometimes takes 10 seconds or more. Scrolling in every app is constantly interrupted by multiple missed frames as new items load. Loading websites like The Verge is just a terrible experience as the whole page jumps up and down for many seconds while scrolling is completely impossible. It's infuriating.

bacro 11y ago
This. 10000 times this. I really, really hope that Windows 10 wins this battle. It provides the best of both worlds. We can have snappy performance (iOS) while having access to the file system.
- mchahn 11y ago
  > while having access to the file system. Android has easy access to the file system. You can download one of many file managers.
  - bacro 11y ago
    What I meant was that Windows can have the good parts of both iOS and Android. To be clear: it can run as smooth as iOS while letting me access the file system as Android does. Another rant on Android: Developing apps for it is so bad... The guy that thought it was a good idea to destroy and recreate an Activity's after orientation changes should be fired. iOS's approach is 10000 times easier and faster EDIT: Corrected when I said Activity's UI was destroyed to the Activity itself
jordanthoms 11y ago
Completely agree with all your points, especially with Chrome. This is one reason I'm still hoping the Chrome OS / Android merge will take more from the Chrome OS side as the performance there is great. One thing to check though - do you have _any_ accessibility services enabled (Lastpass is a common one). They absolutely murder performance and since turning Lastpass off my 6P is far from perfect but much better than it was.

itsjoesullivan 11y ago

Picked one of these up last week. Sending it back this week. Had I known the current state of the Android tablet experience, I would have been more upset when ChromeOS lost the Pixel team.

pluma 11y ago

As a content Android user (don't own or plan to own a single iOS device though I have used iPads at work) and I replaced my Nexus 7 (2013) with the Pixel C. So far my only criticism has been the price tag. The keyboard is pretty much mandatory to get the full experience and with the keyboard and two spare cables I ended up with ~€800 for the whole package. Yes, some apps can get laggy (more so than they should) and it's good to see the firmware is getting some updates but it's far from "completely dysfunctional".