90 SEPTEMBER 2019 |COMPUTERSHOPPER|ISSUE 379
2-IN-1sANDCONVERTIBLES
NOTLONGAGO,the notion of spending
more than £1,000 on aChrome OS laptop
would have been laughable.Today, however,
ChromeOS has developedintoasurprisingly
powerfuloperatingsystem, meaningdevices
such as the Pixel Slatedeserve to be taken
much more seriously.
Pricing varies drasticallyaccordingto
which processoryou choose;optionsrange
from the relativelyunderpoweredIntel Celeron
3965Y right up to an 8th gen Core i7-8500Y.
We were sent the £969 model, which
includesan Intel Core i5-8200Yprocessor,
8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.Add the
£189 Pixel SlateKeyboard and the price rises
to £1,158, or £1,257 if you buy the Pixelbook
Penstylus as well.
That all puts the Pixel Slatefirmly in
MicrosoftSurface Pro 6territory,althoughthe
Slateisalot thinnerand lighter: withouta
keyboard,the tablet weighs just 700g and is a
mere 7mm thick. That means there’s no room
forafull-size USB port, but then the two USB
Type-C ports you do get are very flexible,
capableof charging,data transfers and video
output to up to two monitors at once.FOLD STRATEGY
The Pixel Slateisdesignedto be used mainly
on adesk attachedto its folio keyboardcase,
which attachesmagneticallyto the tablet’s
spine.This, however,isabit of amixed bag.
To prop up the screen,the rear cover folds
intoatriangle shape with asmall flap that
folds back to snap firmly againstthe rear.You
can chooseany angle you like forthe screen
by sliding that flap up and down, but you can’t
push it back furtherthan around45°.
Still, that should be enoughformost
purposes,and in day-to-dayuse,wefound the
keyboardgreat to type on. The circularkeys
maylook odd, but they’re easy to use.
The touchpadbelow the keyboardworks
well, too. It’s responsiveto gestures,has a
positiveclick action and feels lovely under
the finger.
Where the Pixel Slatefalls short is as a
device forwork on the move.When propped
on your lap,itsimply doesn’t feel as stable
as aregular laptop,for acouple of reasons:
first, the sheer length of the thing, which
threatens to tip the tablet off the end your
lap.Second, the centimetre-wide strip of
over-flexiblematerial that sits betweenthe
keyboardand the tablet causes the keyboard
to flop arounddisconcertingly.
The latter is the source of
anotherproblemwith the designGOOGLEPixelSlate
★★★★★
£969•From store.google.comVERDICT
Google’s2-in-1offersalotofwell-crafted
hardware,butthereareafewtoomanylittle
flawsthatmakeitshighpricehardto justifyof the Pixel Slate’skeyboard: when it’s closed,
the keyboardpart doesn’t stayfirmly in place;
it slips aroundand creates the feeling that the
tablet is about to fall out and crash to the
floor,even when it probablyisn’t. It’s asmall
thing, but small things are importantwhen
you’re paying so much, especiallynearly £200
just forthe keyboarditself.PICTURE OF HEALTH
The display, on the other hand, is superb.
It’s 12.3 diagonallywith ahigh 3,000x2,000
resolution,giving acrisp pixel densityof
293ppi.Its LTPS IPS panel helps it to cover
94% of the sRGB colour gamut, and with
an average of delta-Eof 1.86, those colours
will be nicely accurate, too. Apeak brightness
of 432cd/m^2 ensuresthat the Slateisusable
in most conditions,even outdoors in full
daylight. Contrastratio only hits 867:1, which
isn’t great, but generallythe Pixel Slate’s
screen looks great.
It’s disappointingthat there’s nowhereto
store the stylus on the tablet or the keyboard
case,but there are no major issues with how
the PixelbookPenworks –and, crucially,it’s
easy to find apps that supportit properly.
In fact, the only real issue is related to
software.Google Keep has great potential to
work as aprimary note-taking app on the PixelSlate, not least becauseGooglerecognises
your handwritingautomaticallyand makes
your notes searchable.The problemis that its
palm rejectionjust isn’t effective enough.
Attempt to take notes while resting your palm
on the screen,and it all toofrequentlyskips
aroundas you try to writewith the stylus.
Our dual-core,1.3GHz Intel Core i5-8200Y
model acquitted itself fairly well when it
came to performance.Itcan struggleif you
load it up with loads of tabs and lots of big
GoogleSheets,but while there was the odd
momentof slowdown,it was by no means a
regularoccurrence.
Since our usual 4K benchmarksdon’t work
on ChromeOS, we ran the Geekbench4CPU
benchmark,in which the Pixel Slatescored
3,672 in the single-coretest and 7,898 in the
multicoretest. These are very decent scores,
althoughthey’re lower than what the Core
i5-equippedSurface Pro 6can achieve.
Intel Y-Series CPUs usually make up for
their lower horsepowerwith better power
efficiency.It’s not ahuge difference,but the
Pixel Slatedid score awin here with 8h 48m
in our battery benchmark,longer than the
Surface Pro 6’s 8h 2m.BUGS LIFE
Sadly,there are still issues with ChromeOS
that hold it back from truly competingwith
Windows10 as an everydaylaptop OS.
The range of supported applicationshas
increaseddramatically,but we often ran into
software kinks: besidesthe aforementioned
palm rejectionproblems,the BBC iPlayer
app refused to playvideo in Full HD,and
the onscreenkeyboardrepeatedly failed
to appear when we tried editing text
withoutthe physicalkeyboardattached.
We could go on, but the fact is that
the Pixel Slatedoesn’t feel polished
enoughto go head to head with the
Surface Pro 6, which is ahuge shame,
consideringhow much it gets right.