Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Tech of the Year: Tablets!”.
Hey, what is up guys mkbhd here and tablets, tablets kind of had a weird year in 2015., we’re all familiar with where tablets sit in between smartphones and computers, but lately as they try to differentiate themselves. They’Ve blurred that whole line case and point. What do these three tablets from this year have in common two of them? Have the word pro in the name? They all kind of have this first party keyboard attachment, but really they all really want to be laptops. This is google’s pixel c. The pixel c is beautiful, not gon na lie.
It’S actually one of my favorite pieces of recent google hardware, but it is the most awkward combo with its keyboard. So the tablet itself by itself it’s an excellent, build completely unibody metal enclosure has the chamfered edges and a really solid feel in the hand, has some nice weight to it too. It’S one of those smaller tablets, but it’s solid you’ve got the 10 inch 2560 by 1800 lcd up front and these big stereo speakers on either side that get really loud for media or games or whatever you use it for and even that dope, always on color Bar on the back that behaves the same way it does on the chromebook pixel and inside it’s all high-end for a tablet. So it’s rocking the nvidia tegra x1 chip and three gigabytes of ram performance.
While it’s okay, it actually isn’t the greatest thing in the world. It’S fairly normal throughout, but sometimes apps take an extra second to open and there’s animation stuttering more often than i expected. So it’s not to the point where it’s a problem or it’s unusable or anything. But i expected it to be corrected with software updates, and i certainly didn’t expect it to have this problem out the box anyway. This is the keyboard dock. It has one of the more interesting magnetic attachment mechanisms. It’S not really intuitive or like a normal laptop but they’re held together with magnets normally and it kind of sort of looks like a normal laptop before we start to mess with it to open it. What you have to do is slide them apart then turn the tablet around and click the magnets into place and then pull up on the hinge.
Now these magnets are really strong, so once you get it open like this, you’re solid, it’s gripping that back panel with some force and you can use it without worrying about it slipping you can adjust the angle and everything it works, just fine. To put it back. You flatten the keyboard and then slide it off flip it over and then place it face down and from there you’re good to go and there’s actually an additional battery in the keyboard. That’S now wirelessly charging the tablet, so that is legit. Unfortunately, the downside is this.
Is like the most awkward keyboard for any tablet, it almost seems pointless after you use the pixel c for a while. I found myself looking on the keyboard for, like a home button, a back button, a multitasking button or even like any android shortcut keys. There’S none of that.
The only android specific button is just the google search button. This is basically just the keyboard, the letters themselves for literally, if you need to type out a lot of text, and i can’t think of many people who type that much on their tablet to justify spending 150 bucks on an accessory like this. There’S. This really great article i’ll link it right below that like button by ron amadeo on rs technica on how this tablet, the pixel c was probably never meant to run android and it was designed as a chrome, os tablet and then at the last minute, plans left Us with this now android isn’t bad on tablets, but it obviously still has its quirks. Plenty of apps are still portrait only and plenty just don’t measure up to the more functional desktop or even specifically, ipad apps, so pixel c kind of falls short of its potential. It’S a bunch of awesome hardware, but it just doesn’t quite fill the shoes.
I imagined it to what’s. Fun, though, is even if you just get it as an android tablet and never use the keyboard. You still get the side benefit of being filled with a whole lot of strong magnets enough to stick it to refrigerator boom. There’S your smart fridge now here we have the ipad pro. This is the most well known of the bunch, and it’s partially due to the huge popularity of the other ipads that came before this one and ipad pro, as we already know, is huge.
We’Ve talked about it, it has a big beautiful, 12.9 inch, 2.7 k display and again an all metal jacket, just obscenely fast performance throughout we already know the a9x is legit, so it’s like the ideal candidate to replace a laptop. If any right, it also happens to have the best tablet. Only battery life of any of the three but touch is the primary interaction on an ipad for sure there are tons and tons of ipad specific apps in that app store and, of course, they’re pretty much. All made for using it with your hands, so all your games, your productivity, everything with the ipad pro, is by default kind of done with your hands on the display.
Now i do have your first party accessories. You kind of can’t forget to mention the apple pencil which, in all honesty, is objectively actually a pretty good stylus people usually don’t need a stylus, but for those who do use one, this is your best option for the ipad pro in terms of performance and low Latency, i just kind of wish it had an eraser, and i also wish it didn’t charge like a giant lollipop, but all that being said, the keyboard accessory is yet again the one that shows how much ipad pro wants to compete with laptops gets a little closer To a normal laptop experience, so the keys themselves don’t have a lot of travel or click but they’re kind of like the 12-inch macbook, but there’s some useful stuff. So there’s a command button on either side an option button, a control button and they all work kind of how you’d expect them on a laptop running os 10..
So command t in the browser opens a new tab command and space from anywhere opens search like on a mac. So i can say that this one’s intuitive you’re still going to get handsy with an ipad pro, though so. The keyboard case for 170 bucks offers a tiny bit of extra functionality, but again you’re, definitely not fully replacing a laptop now.
Lastly, here we have microsoft surface pro 4.. This tablet is the closest to a laptop of any of them. It has a 12.3 inch, 2.7 k display full metal body again with a little bit more of an industrial look and feel a little more weight. It has fans and vents for cooling, and you can spec it up to full on laptop internals. You can give it a terabyte ssd, you can go core i5 or core i7 and you can go up to 16 gigs of ram and give it intel. Iris graphics has a full size, usb port, full size, sd card slot and full windows 10, so full desktop. Apps, the microsoft office suite the whole deal, so almost anything you can do on any other windows, 10 laptop.
You can do on surface pro 4.. So, on top of that software experience, the keyboard attachment for surface pro 4 is also by far the best of the bunch to the point where it’s really part of buying a surface pro. You really shouldn’t get one without the keyboard. The travel and clickiness of the keys is most like a normal laptop. It feels like regular typing. It even has backlighting, and the hinge mechanism on the surface itself keeps it at pretty much whatever angle you want, which makes it pretty great for again normal work. You do on a normal laptop and the real kicker is. This keyboard has a touchpad with a mechanical click and gestures and everything, so you don’t actually need to touch the display on the surface pro 4 for much of anything of what you’re doing so.
This guy is so well geared as a laptop with the keyboard and the trackpad that it actually kind of struggles as a tablet. It’S sort of the opposite of the ipad pro experience. Now all the full windows apps are built for being used with a mouse and keyboard touch is secondary.
Touch is awkward on the surface pro 4 and pretty much any convertible windows tablet for that matter. So you’ll get the most out of a surface pro 4. With that keyboard and trackpad for sure so back to the three tablets to simplify and sum it all up, you have photoshop express photoshop fix full adobe, photoshop, you’re, rocking android, video editor or imovie or adobe premiere in after effects, google docs iwork or the full microsoft Office suite you kind of get the idea.
They all really want to be laptops, but they’re, not quite there, because they’re not quite laptops for now. Anyway, thank you for watching and if you enjoyed, you might be interested in the other tech of the year roundups, which you can find made by people who you saw appear throughout this video, so juddner your average consumer with his favorite headphones john tld with the best Smartphones and austin evans with the best gaming tech of the year, thanks for watching and i’ll talk to you guys in the next one peace you .