Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Google Pixel Slate: This Ain’t It Chief!”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd here and this is the google pixel slate – this tablet uh. It was announced alongside the pixel 3 back in october. I ordered one. Then it didn’t ship for a couple weeks. It was a little bit delayed, but now i’ve got mine and this thing has made me so sad and confused and curious, but mostly sad like if i was doing a tablet awards show also for 2018. This one would most likely end up getting the toilet bowl. Trophy bust of the year: here’s why so, whenever a new tech product comes out and it’s a letdown, obviously that’s a disappointment for everyone, but it’s an even bigger disappointment when the expectations and the potential were sky high. So that’s like something: what happened with the phone bust of the year, the red hydrogen, i’m someone who likes a lot of red products. I respect what they do. They announced they’re coming out with a new product. That’S a phone! My expectations are way up here. The phone comes out. It’S really bad, then, that delta, between what i expected and what we got was just drastic.
That’S what’s happening again here with the pixel slate. So when the ipad pro came out earlier this year, i thought like wow. This is going to be really hard for anything to beat this.
The ipad already had this huge lead over every other tablet, and they just took another huge step forward with this build and this incredible performance like how can anything else measure up? There are other tablets, of course, that do other things well, but none of them really touched the ipad as far as usability, but then pixel slate just kind of loomed on the horizon. So when i finally got mine, i was really pumped and i want to give it a shot at possibly taking over. All of my tablet use like maybe this will be just as fun to use as the ipad pro, maybe even more fun, because it has a few key advantages like right off the bat.
Any first impression of a device starts out the box with the aesthetics, and this is a solid looking tablet. It’S almost matte black, it’s this sort of dark, matte, blue, all the way around, there’s almost no logos, but just a subtle classic g in the corner, and it’s a pretty symmetrical and balanced, no camera bump at all. That’S a good start and the more i looked into this the more. I remember all these reasons that google was telling me back in october why this was going to be the dopest laptop tablet convertible and to me i don’t know possibly better than the ipad pro. So it has a pair of stereo front-facing speakers just like back in the nexus 10 days, so audio is actually facing towards me and i can pretty much. Never accidentally block them and the sound turns out is pretty good. It’S got volume, it’s full, it’s great for a tablet and then the display is by far the flagship piece of this hardware. It’S not 120 hertz, but everything else about it is super high end. It’S a 3 000 by 2000 12.3 inch display so a little taller than 16×9 and plenty sharp. It’S called a molecular display. I don’t know why they have to name everything, but they do. The point is it’s super crisp.
This is the max brightness. It’S not very bright, but it’s still indoors plenty, fine and really good. Looking for watching, shows and videos and things like that, and then there are even smaller things like the i o. There are two usbc ports, one on each side: uh either one can be used to plug in to charge and you can plug in both at the same time, if you want to one for charging and one for some accessory and even the power button on the Side doubles as a fingerprint reader, so no need for face unlock, but basically every time you hit the button, you’re already securely unlocked, and then it has these smart pins at the bottom. That work perfectly with this incredible pixel slate accessory that i think, is objectively better than apple’s the keyboard, so the slate sort of slaps into this keyboard at the connector.
And then there are enough magnets in both the tablet and the folio. The case itself that you can connect it to prop up the back and once they’re connected it’s literally any angle, instead of just some set number of fixed angles, and on top of that it has chrome os, which, on paper, is a nice combo of chrome. For all your web stuff, plus the play store for all these android apps, all in one place and the usb c ports that can actually read accessories like sd cards and storage drives it’s a proper power users paradise. So i was pumped about all of this. Like my expectations are really high, there’s a lot of great hardware.
Maybe this will unhook me from the ipad pro and be just as good. Then i used it and pretty much all of that went directly out the window. Welcome to lag city, population pixel slate. You might remember i i didn’t show my first impressions of the pixel slate in my video, where i went to google before they unveiled the pixel 3., and that was because i literally thought there’s no way it’s this bad and it’s pre-production software and i’ll give them The benefit of the doubt – and i didn’t show it on camera – and i just did a pixel 3 first impressions, but i did see this in pre-production mode, but now that they’re shipping it like this uh it’s this is it it’s almost unbelievable.
This is real time. The animation for multitasking legitimately takes several seconds, and it’s everywhere scrolling is not fast. Loading pretty much anything is slow. I feel like this whole ui runs at like 12 to maybe 20 frames per second, usually pinch to zoom in pretty much anything, but especially in web.
Browsing is usually lag city, it’s just not fun and like no matter how many features you throw in here, no matter how powerful chrome os can be i’ll, never be able to use this tablet long enough to even discover half of that stuff, because it’s just really Not fun, i’ve been trying to force myself to use this tablet for the past couple days on and off messing with apps flipping back and forth between web apps and native apps, and doing some writing and watching videos etc. But i never really got very far because within minutes i’m just sitting there annoyed at how much lag and choppiness there is everywhere and of course, that is a stark contrast. Basically, the opposite of what makes the ipad pro so fun to use, which is the excessive effortless and smooth performance thanks to that a12x bionic, it’s massively powerful, so i’m thinking a lot of that has to do with the spec i bought. This is the baseline model. So 600 bucks, so it is cheaper than the ipad pro, and for that money you get four gigs of ram 32 gigs of internal storage and an internal intel celeron processor, which you know, that’s probably a bottleneck. So if i give them that benefit of the doubt, i’d have to spend about 800 bucks, which is the same as ipad pro money just to get out of celeron world, or maybe i should have gone with the i5, but for chrome os.
I like really, they shouldn’t either way they shouldn’t ship this one. This is so sad honestly, and i had a lot of hope, but i literally haven’t been able to force myself to use it long enough to dive into the more niche features or really test the battery life or any of that, because none of that stuff, even Matters if, at the surface it’s borderline unusable the good news. If you want any is this is all software and in theory it can all be fixed in the blink of an eye with a software update and i’ve seen good products get better, but not a lot of terrible things get to be great. So the chances of this tablet becoming incredible are pretty low, but let me just say this isn’t a completely useless tablet. It does have some upsides that i survived long enough to notice chrome os, for example, lets you connect straight to your android phone. So when i’m connected to my pixel, it can tether automatically and use my phone’s data when there’s no wi-fi and it has a messages app.
So they sync up and i can get texts on the tablet and reply without picking up my phone. It’S basically just like apple’s suite the ai at the top trying to predict what you’ll do next or what app you’ll open next is actually pretty good, unlike some others and with chrome. Since it’s straight up a web browser, you can go split screen with multiple tabs. In multiple windows, it’s still extremely slow and annoying, but if you know that the features are here, you can take advantage of this and honestly, this thing does much better as a laptop than it does as a freestanding tablet that now that requires buying the optional 200 Keyboard accessory, which is not cheap, but it is really good. This thing, first of all, is made of much more premium materials. I’Ve hated the fingerprinty rubber apple uses for a while. This one’s soft touch, it’s fabric on the outside and the magnet is stronger, and once you connect it, the magnets stay stuck to the metal. So you have your infinite angles for adjustment instead of just two or three literally just by sliding it up and down. It has more specialized function, keys that work specifically in chrome, os, so brightness, media multitasking, there’s a google assistant button and the keys themselves have way more travel, so they’re better for people who like to type for a little while the keys are freaking backlit. So you can see them in the dark and there’s a trackpad and mouse.
So it’s basically a whole laptop action happening. There’S two fingers scrolling the whole deal, obviously something i really missed on the ipad. I could even go so far as to say the pixel slate with this really good keyboard accessory is closer to replacing an actual everyday laptop than the ipad pro is with its keyboard accessory. That would be a bold thing to say, but i could say it, but without this keyboard, if you were planning on using this as your daily tablet, this ain’t it chief – this is not the move, do not spend 600 on this. My advice would be give a shot for the the i5 or i7 versions of it. Maybe performance will be better and you can use it more often as a laptop or if you only have that 600 bucks to spend just get an ipad. So that’s pretty much. It a sad story, but that’s the truth.
Thanks for watching catch, you guys in the next one peace. .