Tech / Product News & Reviews

Google throws Pixel C users a bone with split screen, but still neglects tablet basics.

by Ron Amadeo – Sep 11, two thousand sixteen Two:00 pm UTC

The Pixel C tablet has had a harsh life. Under its code name of "Ryu," the Pixel C commenced life in the Chrome OS open source repository, seemingly indicating that at one point it was meant to run Chrome OS. Google was experimenting with a touchscreen interface for Chrome OS to the point that an on-screen keyboard (which is mostly worthless on a laptop) shipped in the stable version. A finished version of an "all-touch" Chrome OS never materialized, however, and we ended up with a Pixel C running regular Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

The result was a "productivity" device that couldn’t multitask. You could type like a champ with the Pixel C’s keyboard, but the one-app-at-a-time nature of Android made things like referencing information while typing pretty much unlikely. The Pixel C was all the more disappointing because we knew a split screen mode was coming—a "very experimental" version of the feature debuted in Marshmallow’s developer preview.

Split screen wasn’t ready for the Pixel C’s launch, however, which just fueled the feeling that the C was a half-baked device with software that wasn’t ready for the hardware it was running on. There were other bad signs, too—the tablet had a whopping four microphones on top, which seemed to indicate it was built for some kind of killer voice recognition system, but it didn’t even support always-on Google voice directions at launch.

In a Reddit AMA hosted shortly after the launch of the Pixel C, the development team’s response to questions was something along the lines of "just wait until Android N!" With the consumer version of Android N—Android 7.0 Nougat—finally out, let’s take another look at the Pixel C. A total eight months after its release, can Nougat save the Pixel C? What’s the status of Android tablets now that split screen has arrived? Is Android indeed ready for a device with a hardware keyboard?

We’re still not sure about hardware issues

This is my third Pixel C. The very first tablet had uncountable connection problems inbetween the keyboard and tablet, and shortly after the review, we received a replacement unit that performed much better. After a few months of ownership, unit #Two embarked randomly rebooting after a security update. Some long threads in the official Google forums get into this, so mine wasn’t an isolated case.

Numerous OTAs arrived and even the N developer preview, but the random reboot problem never went away. It was later discovered that the only way to fix the random reboot problem is to have the hardware substituted. I disregarded this and by hand updated the Pixel C to the final version of Android 7.0 Nougat, and it promptly died, refusing to boot past the recovery screen.

Time for replacement #Three! So far, things have been fine.

Do Android tablet apps still suck? (Spoiler alert: Yes)

The Ars Technica Facebook page on the Pixel C. A shockingly-high number of apps does not support landscape mode in some or all of the interface, which is the primary orientation for the Pixel C.

The Ars Technica Facebook page on the Pixel C. A shockingly-high number of apps does not support landscape mode in some or all of the interface, which is the primary orientation for the Pixel C.

Google’s flagship movie talk app on the Pixel C—it’s not compatible.

Composing a tweet with the official twitter app.

Instagram—no landscape support here either.

If you want an example of a good app, Microsoft actually does an amazing job with all of its major apps.

Excel is awesome on a tablet.

The NFL’s apps are pretty superb, too.

From Google, Gmail is still the gold standard.

YouTube is good, too.

The established wisdom is that the app situation on Android tablet is awful, but I hate repeating the established wisdom year after year without at least checking in on things once in a while. So let’s investigate.

In the year 2016, do Android tablet apps still suck? To response this, I installed the top two hundred apps on the Pixel C and gave them all a quick test drive. I looked at apps only—not games—using this "Top Apps only" Play Store list. The idea is that games scale just fine on tablets; it’s apps that are the challenge.

Of the top two hundred apps:

• Nineteen were not compatible with the Pixel C
• Sixty-nine did not support landscape at all
• Eighty-four were stretched-out phone apps
• Twenty-eight were, by my judgment, actual "tablet" apps

That there aren’t many tablet apps isn’t a surprise to most people. What was a shock was the lack of landscape support in so many apps. More than thirty three percent of the top two hundred were all portrait, all the time, and many more (even some Google apps) had interstitials and other single screens that didn’t support landscape.

Android apps are primarily used on phones, which are primarily used in portrait mode. The Pixel C primarily lives in landscape mode, though—the cameras, physical buttons, microphones, and speakers are oriented with the expectation of landscape, and the device must be in landscape in order to use the physical keyboard. When compared to the phone market, this is a very infrequent configuration that creates a problem in apps that most people won’t notice.

Most of the "phone" apps fall into three categories on a tablet: there’s the dreaded stretched-out app, which makes no layout considerations for a tablet. Then there are the "Card" apps that hope to scale well on tablets by sticking everything into a card container, which then just gets slotted into a grid that fits your screen. There’s also the "pile box" app, which puts big margins on the left and right side of a phone app, relieving a bit of the "spread out phone app" problems. But none of these apps are more powerful on a tablet the way a multi-pane, tablet-native app is.

One of the best tablet app makers in the top two hundred is Microsoft. Observing why is effortless. Google’s design methodology is to view tablets as big phones, but Microsoft views them as lil’ desktop computers. As a result, you get killer versions of Word, Excel, Outlook, and Skype, with information-dense, multi-pane layouts.

Related video: