Google Pixel C hands-on: A well-built but clunky convertible Android tablet

SAN FRANCISCO—The newest Pixel is a just an Android tablet. The Pixel C doesn't run Chrome OS, it's a 10.2-inch Android tablet with a removable keyboard. Pixel apparently isn't a Chrome OS-exclusive product line anymore.

While it doesn't run Chrome OS, Pixel C does inherit the design and build quality of the Pixel line. It's an all-aluminum silver laptop with a minimal squared-off design. The back of the device has the traditional Googlely-colored Pixel logo, which is a straight line with red, green, blue, and yellow segments. The line is actually a light, and tapping the back display the remaining battery power by lighting up part of the logo.

The removable keyboard sticks to the tablet only with magnets. When closed, the magnets align the keyboard to the tablet, making for a tidy rectangle. The keyboard can also stick to the back of the device with the screen exposed. For "laptop mode" there is a hinged magnetic plate on the keyboard that the screen sticks to. The hinge will go from about 100 degrees to a completely flat 180 degrees, and like a laptop hinge, it is stiff enough to sit at any angle in between.

The magnets are really strong. In laptop mode, you can hold the device by either end without it falling apart. To separate the tablet and keyboard, bend the "laptop" beyond 180 degrees like you were going to break it over your knee. It's kind of fun and satisfying. The hinge on our demo unit was stiff, but in laptop mode the screen would wobble after being poked. There is no trackpad on the Pixel C, so you'll be poking the screen a lot.

The Pixel C display has a 1:1.414 aspect ratio, which seems purpose-built to show off Android Marshmallow's experimental multi-window mode. In early Android M Preview builds multi-window could be turned on, but it was extremely buggy and unfinished. It has since disappeared from the developer preview, and Google isn't talking about it on the Pixel C, but we get the feeling the hardware was built with split screen in mind.

The keyboard moves around a lot of the traditional laptops keys to make more room for the primary letter keys. There's no function keys, the enter key is this odd long shape, and shift is a little smaller than normal. An entire column of keys on the right side of a normal keyboard are missing. There's no bracket or pipe keys, and the number row plus key has been moved down an entire row.

It's still a small laptop keyboard that will take some getting used to, but it seemed usable. There is about as much key travel as a normal laptop, but the keyboard platform didn't seem as still as something like a MacBook.

The top of the pixel has four microphones, which seems really excessive. We didn't have time to train the voice activation stuff, but we imagine "Ok Google" commands on this will be really, really good.

As for why this is a "Pixel" brand product and not a Nexus: Unlike a Nexus product, this is a Google-brand device. The company tried to go the OEM-route with the HTC-built Nexus 9, and it ended up being pretty janky. Perhaps in a bit to improve the build quality of its next tablet, the company decided it needed to design the tablet itself and contract the product out to an ODM.

The move to Android is a weird one. Are crappy Android tablet apps better than Chrome OS apps? Even Google itself barely supports tablet Android with apps anymore. Many of Google's apps are still just blown up phone apps, or add a ridiculous amount of whitespace to the left and right side of the app. Few of them are the dual-pane tablet apps you would expect from a fully supported ecosystem.

Android's Chrome browser is still nowhere near as good as Chrome OS's browser, especially for a large device with a keyboard. There has never been an all-touch Chrome OS device though, so perhaps Google felt Android was needed.

Overall, the Pixel felt clunky. The lack of a trackpad on hardware like this is really disappointing, but Android's trackpad support is awful anyway. If this is the start of a new tablet push by Google, where it will update a ton of its apps with a dual pane tablet mode and enable split screen functionality in Android, we might change our tune. We've thought that with every new Nexus tablet though, and Google's tablet support never seems to get any better. We'd rather have a Chrome OS laptop.

The Pixel C will start at $499 for a 32GB version, with another $149 for the keyboard. Pricing for the UK, or indeed any other non-US territory, hasn't yet been revealed by Google.