The Chromebook Pixel Review
by Jason Inofuentes on May 31, 2013 8:00 AM ESTInput
A high pixel density isn’t the only thing special about the display. A capacitive 10-point touch layer is built-in, and though the OS isn’t exactly touch-centric, it is nice to have the option. The reality fo the market, though, is that touchscreens are inevitable. As the price of the technology drops and users become more accustomed to them the barriers to inclusion become nil. It feels gimmicky at times, and the keyboard/mouse schema has never seemed to me like one waiting to be disturbed. But including touch doesn’t detract from the experience, and I found myself putting it to use way more than I expected. Does a site render text too small to read? Resize in a flash. Scrolling through Google Maps looking for something? It’s probably quicker to do it with one finger on the screen than two on the trackpad. Even on-screen buttons are quicker to hit with your finger than by dragging the cursor to them and then tapping, provided the action area is large enough. It wasn’t long after I started using it that it just became the natural reaction. All sorts of buttons are just waiting to be pressed, and it becomes so instinctive that you will spend days after reaching up to lesser equipped screens.
Scrolling and other touchscreen gestures were at one point quite choppy. In the course of this review, though, updates to the software have drastically improved performance to the point I almost prefer it to the touchpad. That said, you’re often not sure what you’ll get when you open up a given app. Sites where a pinch to zoom gesture can have a useful impact, say Google Maps, can implement the appropriate APIs and often are. In sites with responsive designs, zooming can alter layouts for readability, though often that ends up feeling like two processes competing with each other. Pinch to zoom does simply that in less responsive designs, or sites that lock onto a particular layout, such as GMail. These features are hidden behind chrome://flags because they remain a work-in-progress, but I urge any users to turn them on and try them out. You’ll likely forget about that touchpad before long.
Speaking of that touchpad, it remains frustrating that so few players in the notebook space have nailed touchpads. It should be particularly embarrassing to other notebook manufacturers that this is Google’s first attempt, and they’ve done an excellent job. The large glass trackpad offers a novel tactile experience after so much time with Apple’s units, but is no less well performing. Taps and clicks are registered without fail and the scrolling experience with the touchpad is smooth and easy. Once again, the settings to activate more complex gestures on the touchpad are buried deep within chrome://flags/ so they’re not quite ready for primetime. But they offer something that Chrome has dearly needed, real multitasking.
Before I leapt into the world of OS X, or Linux for that matter, I was knee deep in Windows 7. Dozens of tabs spread across four or five browser windows and a few other applications, all in one space. OS X showed me that windows management was distinct from workflow management. The early days of Chrome OS were an experience that, then, felt all too familiar. When the hardware was incapable of handling more than a few tabs, it was easy to be diligent about culling the fat and closing unused pages. Better hardware made clear that something in software needed to be done to better manage the myriad of web apps and pages I could now keep open.
The technique that Google chose is familiar to OS X users, and revolves around that capacious touchpad. Buried in chrome://flags are options for three-finger touchpad gestures. Three finger swipes left and right let you scroll through a given window’s tabs, and three finger swipes up and down let you scroll through the available windows. The window switching is particularly useful and unique; unlike OS X, swipes don’t shift one position at a time, rather allow you to scroll through the open windows like a stack of cards. The gesture is not yet refined and requires some amount of practice to get right. The difference, though, makes this a multi-tasker’s tool.
We’ll end our input discussion with my favorite of all, the keyboard. If the design of the Pixel advances the experience of an all aluminum notebook, the keyboard similarly moves the goal posts. This isn’t a revolutionary component; the keys are a little squarer but the layout isn’t novel. The CapsLock key is once again usurped by the dedicated Search button, which I might actually use more often if it sat where the Start/Option key did. Instead the CTRL and ALT keys are broad on the left side, which does make them easy targets when switching tabs/windows. I was surprised by the mechanical action of the keys. One of the compromises of thin notebook designs is the depth of the keys, and their motions. Laying your fingers on the Pixel’s keys they feel slightly wobbly, and I was expecting a quite squishy typing experience. Instead, though shallow, the keys action is quite refined, with an easy to discern and trigger point that makes precise typing a breeze. The broad palm rests made for a very comfortable typing experience and overall I had no problems clicking away for hours at a time. This fountain of praise for the keyboard ends with the row of function keys. Controls for volume, brightness, window switching and dedicated back, forward and refresh make up this row, and you’ll make haste to find ways to avoid them. The keys are remarkably stiff and their action ill defined so lighter depressions don’t have any effect. Can’t have it all, I guess.
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karasaj - Friday, May 31, 2013 - link
What other objectivity can you have than display analysis, battery life, build quality (even still moderately subjective), and performance? Heat and noise I guess, which is normally included in laptop reviews, but considering he can't actually run HWmonitor, and it's also probably hard to actually load up the machine with a super heavy workload, there's not much he left out.If you don't like the subjective parts, skip them. Subjective qualities at the expense of objectivity can be bad, but he hasn't sacrificed that really.
nunomoreira10 - Friday, May 31, 2013 - link
Those color (target and actual) diagrams are great!Please do so again on future displays reviews
frakkel - Friday, May 31, 2013 - link
Finally - Someone who understands that we are not using our notebooks for watching 16:9 movies day long. To see a more square format is very much welcome. Now I will just wait for Haswell and then I will buy.internetf1fan - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Wider screens are better for productivity as you can fit multiple documents side by side. Going back to 4:3 displays really hurts how I work because of lack of space.leexgx - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
we are not talking going back to 4:3 that would be silly, we are talking about website friendly 16:10 screensnot many people use the side by side feature in windows 7
seapeople - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
Not many people use graphics cards, either, so why not just get rid of all those?twtech - Friday, May 31, 2013 - link
Remember the dot-com boom of the '90s, when the internet was supposed to take over everything? And then it didn't, and all these startups went bust, but it still had a significant impact, which continues to grow today?Right now, people are saying, the PC is dead, tablets are the new king. We've heard this mantra before. Notebooks, netbooks, consoles vs. PC gaming, everything new was supposed to kill the desktop PC. And along the way, those things have taken some marketshare when those devices were actually the more appropriate tool for the job.
If all you had was a hammer and nails, but now you have a screwdriver and screws as well, some of the times when you previously used nails, now you'll use screws instead. If you put the usage of nails on a chart, maybe you'd say that they were "dying", and that usage of screws is the future, since of course it was growing from zero. Well, we know that both types of fasteners have their preferred uses. And tablets may replace PCs for certain uses - the use cases in which they are genuinely better. But there would be no sense in trying to use a tablet for things the PC is naturally better at.
Crono - Friday, May 31, 2013 - link
The PC isn't dead. We're just in a transition period where tablets are becoming a very popular form factor of PCs. Anyone who wants to create content knows that a base iPad isn;t going to do you much good unless you have the right apps and preferably a physical keyboard. That's why the Surface and Surface Pro are the right direction, I think, though everyone agrees Haswell is needed to bring better battery life. Hybrid and convertible tablets or ultrabooks - whether they are Android, Windows, or iOS - will be key for the next few years... until we start getting scrolls. ;)Personally, I would love a 10" x 12" x 0.2" OLED flexible scroll computer with a display that can become rigid when completely unfurled from a thin computer core/column.
rwei - Friday, May 31, 2013 - link
Odd that you yourself note the unfavorable comparison to the 13" rMBP, yet your review gushes with enthusiasm for the Pixel. I love shiny, beautiful new gadgets as much as or more than the next guy, but your praise seems excessive.I more or less took away from this is that the Pixel is cool because it makes for a really nice and shiny typewriter, and wow look it's evolving really quickly to the point where it's slowly approaching the level of basic functionality that other systems already deliver.
Arbie - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
rwei - I agree with you completely.And there is a weird parallel between the design effort put into this overdone $1400 browser box and the writing effort put into this overblown, wordy, and just so artfully crafted treatise on it. Is this all a joke of some kind? I got through a couple of pages and couldn't take it any more. If you gave the author an enema he could fit in a shoebox.
As for the computer, the only thing it's ideal for is to make the Surface RT look like a success. Maybe it makes sense as an investment collectible, considering that they're only going to sell two or three. Nothing worthwhile here.