Review: Google Pixel Slate

Personal computing is in an angsty place. With the rise of Frankensoftware comes the promise of an effortless computing future, one in which mobile apps and "regular" apps co-exist peacefully on shiny glass displays and there isn't so much debate about what a modern computer is. That's the promise, anyway. But right now, we're still very much in the in-between. Things are weird.

Google knows this. The company has a vision for what this effortless computing future should be, whenever it arrives. That vision includes Chrome OS, the web-centric operating system it first introduced in 2009, as well as Google's mobile Android ecosystem, and its all-knowing Google Assistant voice platform. All of these technologies are available for you to swipe and tap and shout your way through on the Pixel Slate, Google's newest computing device. Android apps? The Slate can run those. An infinitely touchable Chrome browser? You got it. A voice-prompted restaurant recommendation? OK, Google; holler 'til your heart hurts.

This new Pixel Slate goes on sale today. Bizarrely, it ranges in price from $599 to $1,599. At the high end, you'll get a version of the Pixel Slate that's beefed up with 16 gigabytes of RAM, a 256-gig solid state drive, and an eighth generation Intel Core i7 processor.

Just a few years ago, those would be laptop specs. Now you can get these specs in a tablet that attaches to a keyboard, whether it's the Pixel Slate, Apple's iPad Pro, or Microsoft's Surface Pro. All of these companies have created interactions that let you feel like you can be as productive as you are on a regular PC, even though you're using a tablet. On Microsoft's Surface devices, you can toggle between Tablet mode and, well, Windows 10. On iPad, which runs on iOS, you can work in Split View and drag-and-drop multiple files or photos at once.

The people building the future down in Mountain View saw this, and they basically said, "OK, Google: Hold my beer."

The accessory keyboard attaches to the Slate magnetically. It also draws power from that magnetic connector, so you never have to charge it—just like an iPad Pro's keyboard.

Courtesy of Google

The Pixel Slate's hardware was built to stand out. It's larger and weightier than the Pixel C, Google's last attempt at a premium tablet, and even slightly heavier than the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. It has a bright, high-resolution touchscreen display, coated in Gorilla Glass (Google markets this display under the name "Molecular"). Its diagonal size is 12.3 inches, so it's significantly bigger and more immersive than the 10.2 inch display on the ol' Pixel C.

The Slate is made of anodized aluminum. It ships in one color, an almost-black midnight blue. Its edges are curved, one of those small design decisions that can transform a slate from weaponized metal into something the kids can play with. Google had said last month that it focused a lot on making this tablet holdable; I get that, but it is still large. I mostly used the Pixel Slate in landscape mode, with its accessory keyboard firmly attached.

On the top left edge of the Slate, there's a recessed power button that doubles as a fingerprint sensor, which Google calls Pixel Imprint. You can store up to three fingerprints, which helps eliminate any awkwardness that comes with using different grips to hold the tablet—even if you won't end up holding it vertically that often.

As with many tablets masquerading as laptops, the bit of hardware design that will cause the most pain are the ports—or lack thereof. Ports! We've entered a computing era of 7-nanometer mobile processors and software that guesses what you want to do next and does it for you, but we've lost the simplicity of 3.5mm headphone jacks and SD card slots. The Pixel Slate has two USB-C ports, and a connector for the keyboard. I tried using a dongle to attach a USB 3.0-equipped external drive; it didn't work for me. Google says the tablet should recognize an external drive, so I'll have to keep trying different dongles.

On the upside, the front-facing camera on the Slate is a wide-angle, 8-megapixel shooter that's designed for group video calls. If you end up on video calls a lot, they look great here. And the two front-facing speakers on the Pixel Slate sound flipping fantastic. Which is good, considering that's how you'll be listening to your audio while you wait for your Bluetooth headphones to pair with the tablet, or while you look for your headphone dongle. Because, again, no headphone jack.

Battery life is also excellent. Google estimates a fully charged Slate will last up to 12 hours; after 6 hours of use this past Sunday, I went to bed with the Slate still holding 56 percent of its charge and an estimated 4.5 hours of life still in it. (The Pixel Slate's dynamic battery monitor, though, often spits out new numbers, jumping from 9:52 to 3:29 to 5:22 hours left, without any real explanation.)

It's worth noting that the review period for this product was delayed by a couple weeks because of bugs, mostly around touchscreen responsiveness and the fingerprint sensor. I didn't experience any of the issues Google described, and Google says they've been resolved. The Pixel Slate I was working on, the $999 Intel Core i5 configuration, crashed on one occasion. But otherwise there were no noticeable glitches.

Some people are definitely going to hate it, but I like the Pixel Slate keyboard cover a lot. Like the accessory keyboards made by Apple and Microsoft, it attaches magnetically to one side of the tablet it's In a Relationship with and sucks all of its power from the tablet, so it never needs to be charged. It's a backlit keyboard with a healthy amount of key travel for an accessory keyboard, and it has a nice glass trackpad with multi-gesture support.

One of the reasons why some people might hate the keyboard is that it's not bundled into the price of the Pixel Slate. It costs an extra $199. But they also might hate it because it has round keys. This is consistent with Google's overall product aesthetic; its app icons are round, the G logo on the back of its Pixel products is nearly a full circle, and even the word "Google" has a lot of roundness in it. I like the round keys, and had no problem typing on them. But some people might prefer having the edges of square keys, which can help imprecise typists hit their target key.

My least favorite thing about the Pixel Slate keyboard is that it doesn't provide an adequate counterbalance to the tablet itself. The whole assembly is not especially stable on the lap, and you certainly can't pick up whole thing by the keyboard, which you can do with a traditional clamshell. But! But! The part of the cover that props up the screen slides and magnetically attaches to almost any part of the tablet's back, which means its angle is infinitely adjustable. This is a beautiful thing.

The Pixel Slate also works with a $99 stylus pen, one that's also compatible with Google's Pixelbook laptop. It's a solid, half-aluminum, half-plastic stylus. It felt natural to write and draw with in SketchBook. The stylus has a dedicated Google Assistant button: press the button, draw a ring around an object or chunk of text on a page, and Google will deploy its search skills or its image recognition technology and try to provide more context for you.

This worked well when I wanted to learn more about the make of a wristwatch I saw in a picture. It worked not-as-well when I was just trying to draw something and kept accidentally triggering the Assistant button.

Of course, a computer is more than just its hardware. This is a Chrome OS tablet. It also supports Android apps and has a version of Google Assistant built in. You can do whatever you want on this thing! That's the promise, but reality is a little bit different.

On paper, there's a lot you can do with the Pixel Slate, thanks to its multi-platform approach to software. Its UI has been designed as such so that when it's attached to an accessory keyboard, it looks like a "laptop" desktop, with lots of empty space and an app "shelf," or dock, at the bottom of the display. Detach the slate from its keyboard, and a familiar mobile interface appears—one that's cluttered with app icons and has a back button. Google's search bar, and its Chrome browser, are never far from reach. Neither is the Assistant.

But the question is whether these functions are intuitive and, perhaps more importantly, whether you're gaining control or losing it with these kinds of "smart" interfaces. It's great that you can manipulate windows on the Pixel Slate, but you still can't drop a JPEG or other type of file on Pixel Slate's "desktop." It goes straight into the local My Files folder (or you can put it in Google Drive, natch). It's not dissimilar from the experience on an iPad, and it's one of the things that drives me nuts about working on a large-screened, keyboard-bedecked device with mobile OS constraints.

And it's great that the Chrome browser has giant tabs, designed to be dragged with your finger; but it's awkward that you still have no idea if an app you're tapping on will open as a mobile app or as a tab in a Chrome browser.

Tap on Google Docs, Photos, or YouTube, and it will open as a browser tab in Chrome. The Google Play store opens in a separate window like an app. Instagram and Kindle run as Android mobile apps. Kindle is somewhat optimized for this device, while Instagram absolutely is not. Netflix is optimized for Chrome OS, too, but defaults to a full-sized window when you first open it.

Some of these quirks are the fault of the apps' developers. But Google also defines the app behavior based on what it expects users will want, so it will open apps in Chrome tabs when it thinks that interface is better for multi-tasking.

That's where it all comes back to that vision of the future, the one in which all this doesn't matter. It won't matter what kind of app you're opening as long as long as you can accomplish what you need to, right? And it won't matter where you store local files because, well, it's all moving to the cloud anyway, right? You won't need to connect external devices like a hard drive in the future; everything you need will be accessible through your internet connection.

That's true, but only to a point. And it hasn't stopped the Pixel Slate from trying to usher us in that direction. It's still a little weird, though, here in the land of in-between.