The Google Pixel C Review
by Brandon Chester & Joshua Ho on January 25, 2016 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life
When Apple unveiled the iPad, they promised that it would achieve 10 hour battery life. That has been something of a standard for tablets now, and for the most part we've seen that high end tablets end up meeting that goal, while mid range ones often end up falling short of it. 2015 was a bit of an exception to this in some ways, with many high end tablets also missing this goal by several hours in some cases. Due to the nature of tablets and how they're used, it's really difficult to recommend one if it doesn't achieve enough battery life to last you through the day with a normal workload.
To test the Pixel C's battery life I've attempted to run it through all of our battery tests. First up is our internal web browser test, followed by our video playback battery test.
It's clear that Google's use of a LTPS display and a large battery pay off big time when you look at battery life. Even with the SoC staying on its higher-power A57 cores, the Pixel C manages to last for over 13 hours in our web browsing test. This puts it ahead of every other tablet on record, and by a large margin too.
In video playback the Pixel C once again comes out on top. This is quite surprising, as normally AMOLED tablets perform best in this test due to their ability to turn off pixels when displaying black, as well as their general efficiencies with darker colors and shades. The gap between the Pixel C and the Tab S2 isn't insignificant either, so Google should be very happy with what they've achieved here.
In BaseMark OS II's CPU-bound battery test we again see the Pixel C top the charts. This is really surprising to me, because on the SoC side we're looking at four Cortex A57 cores on a 20nm process. Again, Google's large battery and LTPS display help a great deal, but it's also clear that Tegra X1 isn't causing any significant problems for the Pixel C as far as power consumption goes.
At this point I would normally continue to run our PCMark and GFXBench battery tests. Unfortunately, the Pixel C's software makes it incapable of completing either of them. I made five attempts to complete PCMark, which took a great deal of time as the test runs over many hours. In all cases the tablet locked up during the test and required a hard reboot. It may be possible to eventually get it to complete, but I didn't feel that it was worth delaying the review further in the hopes that I could eventually get the Pixel C to complete the test properly.
As for GFXBench, it instantly stops due to it detecting that the tablet is plugged in. I believe this may relate to Google's system for inductive keyboard charging, but whatever the cause may be the result is that I can't get a battery result for GPU-bound workloads either. It's worth noting that the web test also required several runs before I could get it to complete the test without the tablet crashing, so that's something to think about as far as software stability and reliability goes.
In the end, what I have seen of the Pixel C's battery life leads me to believe that it's quite good, but we're definitely not looking at the entire picture here due to the missing data. I can say that in my experience it seemed to last a long time, so if I had to go out on a limb I would say that the combination of the low power LTPS display panel and a relatively large battery allow for very good battery life even with the CPU running on its A57 cores. Since Tegra X1 has a great deal of GPU power I really wish I could have gotten a GFXBench battery result, but there's not much that can be done there.
Charging
Since tablets usually offer enough battery life to get through the day, being able to charge them incredibly quickly becomes less of a need than with smartphones because you'll often end up only charging your tablet overnight. That being said, the immense charge time required by older tablets which required larger batteries to power their SoCs and displays meant that if your tablet battery did die you probably weren't going to get to use it until the next day. With modern tablets we've seen a push to reduce battery capacity, as well as the inclusion of 10-15W chargers to reduce charge times.
The Pixel C ships with a 15W charger with a USB Type-C connector. The cable is actually fixed to the block, so you can't use it as a normal Type-C to Type-C cable. On the bright side, Google has used a cable which is around four feet long, so you get some extra length compared to using the included cable in the box. As you can see in the graph above, the battery is charged at around 11W while fast charging, which lasts for three hours before trickle charging begins. Getting the remaining 10-15% ends up taking another hour, with the total charge time from 0% to 100% being 4.14 hours. Considering that the Pixel C packs a noticeably larger battery than the iPad Air 2, the roughly four hour charge time is actually quite a good result.
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Laxaa - Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - link
It seems to me like the Pixel C was released a year or two too early.versesuvius - Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - link
Adding a keyboard to an ARM device is just adding insult to injury. ARM devices are never going to be useful beyond what they were intended to be in the first instance, which is content consuming devices. Their advantage, which is size and power consumption, is also their limitation. If any company tries to sell an ARM device with a keyboard, one can be pretty sure that that company is pretty much at the end of the road. Disabling four cores of the processor on the top device from the company, while pushing a keyboard on buyers, just says it all. It says that the buyer was not going to do anything useful with it anyway, that is with this device from this particular company anyway.hMunster - Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - link
How can you appload the battery run time and lament the size and weight at the same time?10basetom - Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - link
So the final grade for the Pixel C is a C. Final grade for Android tablet ecosystem? D-Lolimaster - Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - link
How can you release a tablet without SD reader, come on.This tablet would be perfect for reading my collection comics&manga, I don't want to rely on the internetz just for reading purposes.
Demigod79 - Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - link
A couple of years ago I attached a keyboard case to a Nexus 10 and tried to use it like a laptop. It failed. Even though the Nexus 10 supported keyboard navigation and mouse input I found it difficult to anything really productive, and having a keyboard cover on it limited its functionality as a tablet. The Pixel C seems to be a modern-day rehash of my failed experiment with the Nexus 10 and I can very well imagine how using it would be (that is, very bad).The thing is, I had thought Android tablets would gradually evolve and grow, incorporating desktop features like expanded storage and windows apps. The latter was something that I particularly desired ever since using Samsung tablets that had pop-up apps. I thought this was the future and hoped Google would adopt and expand it to incorporate all apps. Frankly, I never thought tablets should have tablet versions of apps. In my opinion, running one app at a time was largely due to the limited screen space available on a phone, which obviously didn't apply to tablets. I thought the natural thing to do with a tablet was to run those phone apps in separate windows, not have bigger versions of those apps. I dreamed of the day when I would be able to run multiple Android apps at once like I did on my laptop.
I waited in vain for Google to incorporate windows apps, and then last year I got fed up and bought a Surface Pro 4 instead. It was the best decision I had ever made. Not only can the Surface Pro 4 replace my laptop (haven't touched it since) it can also replace my tablet since I can run Bluestacks (Android emulator) on it. Best of all, I can finally run Android apps in a window like I've always wanted to do. Add in the ability to run desktop applications as well as desktop games through Steam and it easily ranks as the best mobile device I've ever bought. I have given up on Microsoft for a while but it now seems to be the future (Android had the potential to be the future but Google squandered the opportunity, and now they are relegated to creating lame products like the Pixel C).
deppman - Friday, January 29, 2016 - link
I agree, although I prefer Ubuntu as my general purpose OS since it is more appropriate for my needs.Have you seen Jive's Remix OS? It's pretty much what you describe, and it's run by ex googlers. I expect Google to buy them out because the evolution is so obvious and correct. It's my guess that internal political BS is what has happened here. If they simply added windowed ART apps to chrome OS - or windowed apps and a full chrome browser build to android, they'd achieve pretty much what you described.
IMO, they are missing a wonderful opportunity to unseat MS as the primary desktop OS by not resolving this obvious elephant in the room.
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alexlaoe - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link
Runs very well. Just bought one and I love the beauty behind the design.https://open.spotify.com/user/artistm/playlist/1RC...
Rc1138 - Sunday, January 31, 2016 - link
Despite my love for big tablets I can't bring myself to like this device. Making a "productivity" tablet is just too early for android. I have a really old nexus 10 and it's nand perfomance as well as overall stability(touch,wi-fi and apps) is several times better than this halfassed powerhouse. The only thing I like about Pixel C is battery perfomance(both battery life and charge time) because nexus 10's charge time equals it's web browsing time(roughly 7 hours). I can't think of a targeted group this tablet is aimed for because for the same price you can buy a really sophisticated surface 3