> Android itself still has issues with responsiveness and latency that bother me<p>> Chrome in particular is really bad regarding responsiveness and latency<p>This can't be emphasized enough. The Android and Chrome teams should be absolutely ashamed of the current state of performance. On my Nexus 5X I regularly have to wait 5 full seconds or more after pressing the app switcher or home buttons before I can perform another action, while animations chug and jank. Screen transitions within apps are often delayed multiple seconds before starting. Launching apps like Twitter or Facebook or Google Maps sometimes takes 10 seconds or more. Scrolling in every app is constantly interrupted by multiple missed frames as new items load. Loading websites like The Verge is just a terrible experience as the whole page jumps up and down for many seconds while scrolling is completely impossible. It's infuriating.
An interesting story. Ars Technica [1] dug up a few months ago the the Pixel C was never meant to run Android - all the way through designed and development it was tested with the Chrome OS loaded. At the last minute, the now unified Android / Chrome OS team decided to switch it to Android as a flagship device of their new Android direction and phasing out of Chrome OS in favor of Android. Result was a mess and probably the crappiest device Google has ever shipped, which anandtech rightfully pointed out.<p>[1] <a href="http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/the-pixel-cs-bumpy-road-from-chrome-os-concept-to-android-adoptee/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/the-pixel-cs-bumpy-ro...</a>
I believe this would be a fantastic Linux machine. But sadly with all the closed components it's not trivial to get an ARM distro running, despite Coreboot.
So they fixed the issues of touches not responding and maybe some of the worst unexpected crashing, but the major issues remain like almost all apps still being built for phone sizes, lack of multitasking and the fact that most apps only run in portrait mode, all of which are really not acceptable on 10" tablets.
As a content Android user (don't own or plan to own a single iOS device though I have used iPads at work) and I replaced my Nexus 7 (2013) with the Pixel C.<p>So far my only criticism has been the price tag. The keyboard is pretty much mandatory to get the full experience and with the keyboard and two spare cables I ended up with ~€800 for the whole package.<p>Yes, some apps can get laggy (more so than they should) and it's good to see the firmware is getting some updates but it's far from "completely dysfunctional".
I'm probably stupid, but I honestly don't understand this device and Google startegy...<p>It's called Pixel instead of Nexus, (it's running Android), so it's confusing to many people, on the market positioning side...<p>At the same time, on the technical side, Android team, after telling us to use Fragments to have nice tablets+phone experience for a few years, seems to not care about fragments anymore. Notably appcompat and design libraries don't work correctly in Fragments anymore... And the Google apps show this very clearly.<p>If Google apps are not supporting tablets correctly, why should we?
Picked one of these up last week. Sending it back this week. Had I known the current state of the Android tablet experience, I would have been more upset when ChromeOS lost the Pixel team.