Mashable on Pixel Slate: ‘An Average and Very Buggy 2-in-1 Tablet’

Raymond Wong, writing at Mashable:

Where the Pixel Slate stumbles the most is software polish. It doesn’t seem finished and I experienced quite a few bugs and crashes that brought Chrome OS and Android apps to their knees.

My review unit’s kitted out with a very capable Intel Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM. But even so, little things like seeing jitters when scrolling on some of Mashable’s media-heavy reviews (like the iPhone XS and Pixel 3), or the slight lag when opening the recent apps window, or the inconsistencies of the colors of videos displayed in the Netflix Android app versus the Netflix website (colors looked way more faded in the app) were frustrating.

Getting colors right is just table stakes.

Google, Microsoft, and Apple are all trying to crack the same nut: to make a device that can work well both as a handheld tablet and as a notebook docked to a keyboard. It really comes down to the operating systems. iPad is a tablet first, and trying to evolve into an ever-better notebook. Chrome and Windows are designed for traditional notebooks, and are trying to evolve into ever-better systems for tablet. Where you start matters.

★ Friday, 30 November 2018