ISSUE 44 • ANDROID ADVISOR 9REVIEWlatency, which is fast, and recognizes 2,000 levels of
pressure, which is about midrange – some competing
pens have up to 4,096 levels of pressure.
Most of the shaft is aluminium, but Google says it
put a white-plastic section near the nib to make the
pen easier to grasp.
There’s just one notable downside to this pen.
Other models we’ve used, such as the Porsche
Design Book One’s Stylus and Microsoft’s Surface
Pen, have one flat edge to keep them from rolling.
The Pixelbook Pen is perfectly round, and it rolled all
over the place on my desk. It would be nice if a £
pen were a bit harder to lose.
Google Assistant and pen support
Normally I’d dive into performance next, but the
Pixelbook is different. Its Android app support, along
with its new capabilities relating to Google Assistant
and pen support, matter much more than its speeds
and feeds. And, overall, my experiences were positive.
I’ve tried Android apps on Chromebooks, and it’s
still a work in progress. Google even warned us that
the Pixelbook’s app behaviour would be buggy due
to the beta build loaded on review units, though the
problems we ran into were few and mostly minor.
Android app support matters because it gives the
Chromebook a lot more to do. For diehard Android
users, being able to use a favourite app on a bigger
display with a keyboard improves usability significantly.
At the time of this review, however, my favourite
app (Instagram), and many other Android apps,
remain stubbornly puny: you can enlarge Instagram