Google Pixel C review:

The Google Pixel C has a slim, compact aluminum build that feels sturdy. Its optional Bluetooth keyboard is equally solid and doubles as the tablet's cover and it has a powerful, long-running battery. The tablet runs the latest version of Android and its performance is lightning fast.

The screen is sharp, bright and colorful, and gaming graphics look stellar. It's a bit heavy when attached to the keyboard (which is sold separately). Big-name apps and games still tend to hit iOS before Android.
The Google Pixel C is the best Android tablet money can buy. Google's latest tablet is its greatest yet. In fact, the Pixel C hands down is the most powerful Android tablet I've ever used. The Pixel C starts at $500 and has a high-end design, spectacular screen, fast performance and long-lasting battery. (UK and Australian pricing has yet to be announced, but the US price converts to around £335 or AU$695.) But with interest in tablets decreasing more and more every year, Google's best effort at a high-end tablet may fall upon deaf ears.

 

As a standalone tablet, its aluminum design is both elegant and solid. When combined with its optional magnetic Bluetooth keyboard ($150), which is made of the same material, the tablet turns into a productivity-geared hybrid. Its duality -- and $500 starting price -- makes it ripe to compete against the Microsoft Surface 3and the iPad Air 2. The problem is, that's like comparing apples and oranges. The Surface is powerful enough to replace a laptop, whereas the iPad works best for leisure activities, like gaming and streaming video.

The Pixel C exists somewhere between the two. The Pixel C is hands down the best Android tablet today. It earns a place near the top of the charts and rivals the iPad Air 2 for the title of overall best tablet. If you're interested in a tablet for work, the strength of its performance will depend on your needs. But if I had to pick between the two, I'd go with the Google Pixel C due to its exceptionally designed keyboard, gorgeous screen and speedy performance.

The Pixel C is available now at Google's Store starting at $500 with 32GB of on board storage. There's also a 64GB version priced at $600, which converts to £400 or AU$835. The optional keyboard is also available at Google and costs $149, which converts to about £100 or AU$205. The 10.2-inch screen is beautiful too, at a resolution of 2560 x 1800 in a screen with an uncommon aspect ratio: 1:√2. That’s the same ratio as a standard A4 piece of paper, which means that the Pixel C’s screen feels capacious whether you’re using it in landscape or portrait mode.

 

The battery is good enough — which doubtlessly accounts for some of the 0.27-inch thickness — and so this tablet just lasts and lasts. In our battery test of refreshing web pages, it topped out over 11 hours. In real-world use I never plugged in the USB Type-C charger until the next morning, even after using it all day.

Design & Features:

The specs are also huge: 3GB of RAM paired to the latest Nvidia X1 64-bit processor. That all seems good, but something is amiss with performance on the Pixel C. There are inexcusable pauses and latency, especially when launching and switching apps. My hunch is that the Android team still hasn’t figured out how to take real advantage of all that power out of Nvidia’s silicon (the Nexus 9 seemed to similarly underutilize its processor). Whatever the reason, it’s a miss. A bad one. Google has consistently released great Android tablets in partnership with the likes of Asus and HTC, but this is the first time the company has built its own model from the ground up.

From the looks of it, Google should've been designing its own tablets all along. The Pixel C has an anodized aluminum frame that looks as luxe as any Apple tablet. It's fashionably matte, smooth and solid. In order to allow space for a large battery, the Pixel C is thicker and heavier than the iPad Air 2, though the difference isn't dramatic to the naked eye. I found both similarly comfortable to hold for long periods of time.One of the best things about the Pixel C is its optional Bluetooth keyboard.

 

It's magnetic and charges inductively. For such a skinny little thing, it's surprisingly comfortable. The main keys are almost full-sized, and the tab and enter keys are sized down. Typing on it doesn't feel as cramped as other Bluetooth keyboards -- it's small yet spacious, and compact enough to use even in the most confined spaces.Once you magnetically attach the keyboard onto the tablet, it automatically connects over Bluetooth and hides the on-screen keyboard.

This worked without a hitch most of the time. In a handful of instances, it took 10-20 seconds for it to work. It still automatically connected without me having to go into the Bluetooth settings, it just sometimes took a little longer than usual. The keyboard doubles as a removable cover, which makes it look more like a laptop, or a tablet with armor. It's probably the most protective keyboard cover around -- built from the same aluminum as the tablet, which makes it both stylish and sturdy.

The magnetic connection between the keyboard and tablet is freakishly strong. I never had to worry about them disconnecting, even if I shook it or held it upside down. Once attached, it's almost like they're super-glued together. Despite its excellent construction, I have a few gripes about the Pixel C's design. There's no trackpad, the keyboard makes it a bit heavy, separating the keyboard from the tablet can be awkward when it's being used as a cover and it's hard to tell which ends of the tablet to magnetically attach.

You can solve the latter problem by flipping one of them around until they click into place since there are only two ways the tablet and keyboard can fit together -- open like a laptop or closed. The keys weren't physically stuck, but letters and key functions dragged out on the screen as if they were. IIt was slightly comical how it elongated letters to create an unintentionally dramatic typing of a word, but it was less funny when the stuck key was the backspace button and I unintentionally deleted an entire sentence instead of a few words.

The bagginess was inconsistent, and didn't seem to be affected by the number of apps that were open in the background. Sometimes letters also lagged and took a while to appear on screen. This might just have been a problem with the keyboard that came with my review unit. Regardless, it made an otherwise pleasant experience into a needlessly frustrating one.

  Unsurprisingly, the tablet works seamlessly with the OK Google voice search. The top of the tablet's edge houses four microphones -- that's three more than most tablets. This makes it easy for the Pixel C to hear you say "OK Google" even if it isn't in your hands at the time. New to Android is the On Tap feature. It's activated by long-pressing the home button (the circle in the center of the tablet's bottom black bar) and it flashes a white border around the screen, as if you just took a screenshot.

After it's surveyed what's on the screen, it displays a list of search results based on what you've been doing. For example, if you just read an article about dinosaurs and use On Tap, it'll bring up search results for specific species mentioned in the text or a link to a website where you can learn more.

Performance

The Pixel C is a powerhouse to be reckoned with. Housing an Nvidia Tegra X1 processor it crushes the competition in 3DMark gaming benchmarks and its graphics are eye-watering. When playing games, I often found myself looking at the wrong things (the detailed, silky smooth scenery) instead of focusing on the action, because they looked that good. Its screen is brighter than the iPad Air 2 and packs more pixels-per-inch (ppi), at 308 ppi to the iPad's 264 ppi. It also appeared just as colorful as the Apple tablet in side-by-side comparisons to my eyes.

HD content on the Pixel C's screen looks stunning. HD video had a detailed sharpness and lifelike colors, accentuated by the high-gloss screen. It can quickly download and launch apps, as well load Web pages and games. Navigating around the OS was equally zippy. The only time I encountered any lag was when the battery was at 1 percent and it was on the brink of shutting off. Even then, I had about 10 apps open in the background and was playing N.O.V.A. 3, a game that took up a lot of the tablet's horsepower.

The Pixel C has speakers on its left and right edges, and they actually sound pretty good. Most tablet speakers are underwhelming and tinny at higher volumes, almost begging you to use headphones instead. In contrast, I found the Pixel C's pair appropriately loud and fuller-sounding than most. They sound great when watching movies and gaming, but the sound quality does lack some bass. There's only one port on the tablet: USB-C. It can be used for both charging the tablet and connecting it to a computer. What's great about USB-C is how fast it is.

The Pixel C comes with a charger that rapidly powers it after its battery is fully drained. After letting the tablet battery die, I charged it for 15 minutes, disconnected it from the charger, then turned it on. It had about seven percent of battery. Seven percent may not sound impressive, but it lasted me about 50 minutes of heavy use. A full charge takes about two and a half hours. Speaking of battery life, after one test run in the CNET Lab, the Pixel C lasted 12.7 hours. We test tablet batteries by looping a local 720p video at medium brightness in airplane mode.

Comparison 

It's hard to place the Pixel C on the spectrum of today's tablets, but not because it's not a good tablet. It's a great tablet -- one of the best -- it just lands somewhere in-between the casual coolness of the iPad Air 2 and the work-hard-play-hard seriousness of the Surface 3. While you can definitely use it to write an essay, you won't be able to use it quite like a laptop. The Google Pixel C's limitations aren't due to its hardware.

It's limited because the Google App Store, as much as it has improved over the last few years, still can't match iOS in breadth and depth. And unless an app launches on both OSes simultaneously, popular apps still typically launch on iOS first. The Surface 3, which costs $500 in the US, and iPad Air 2, which can currently be found for as low as $445, are both similarly swift in performance, portable and stylish in their own way. You can't go wrong if you're choosing between these two and the Pixel C, but it all depends on what you're looking for.

The Surface 3 will give you the full Windows 10 experience, the iPad Air 2 benefits from the Apple App Store's selection and variety, and the Pixel C offers Android's signature ability to customize the interface in ways that best suit you. The Pixel C's top-shelf specs and sleek aluminum Bluetooth keyboard seem to put it in the same class as work-focused heavy-hitters like the Apple iPad Pro and Microsoft Surface Pro 4. But it's important to note that they're actually not that similar, especially in terms of price. The artistically inclined iPad Pro and Surface Pro 4 powerhouse will set you back $900 in the US. Unlike these two, the Google tablet doesn't aim to replace or one-up your laptop.