Revisiting the Google Pixel C – Better, but Not There Yet | Hacker News Reader

Revisiting the Google Pixel C – Better, but Not There Yet

anandtech.com

> Android itself still has issues with responsiveness and latency that bother me

> Chrome in particular is really bad regarding responsiveness and latency

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.

I cannot agree with this hard enough. When I went back to my old iPhone 5S after breaking my 2nd Gen Moto X's screen, I was astounded how fast and smooth everything was. I love the flexibility of Android, but there's no doubting it is significantly worse than iOS (and WP) in terms of overall UI performance.

Although the sheer awfulness of the iPhone default keyboard and the flakiness of its implementation for 3rd party replacements continues to amaze me.

> 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.

What's worst about this is that on newer Android-devices this problem is significantly worse than it was on any previous Android-device I have owned with any previous or earlier version of Android.

Android 6.x seems to have serious performance issues, memory leaks(?) and require me to reboot my devices regularly to keep them working.

It completely blows my mind how this release could pass QA and end up released to market.

Within the developer options, consider enabling 'Force GPU rendering', followed by a restart. On my Nexus 6P, this significantly improved UI responsiveness, bringing it closer to that of the iPhone 6s. Scrolling, zooming, and app switching are now silky, or "buttery", smooth. My friend with a Nexus 5X, however, noted only a marginal improvement; so your mileage may vary.

How does your battery respond?

Completely agree with all your points, especially with Chrome. This is one reason I'm still hoping the Chrome OS / Android merge will take more from the Chrome OS side as the performance there is great.

One thing to check though - do you have _any_ accessibility services enabled (Lastpass is a common one). They absolutely murder performance and since turning Lastpass off my 6P is far from perfect but much better than it was.

Not that it's much consolation, but you can make your Nexus 5X run better by rebooting it nightly. I am hoping future software updates fix it, seems to be some sort of RAM issue.

I reboot my Nexus 5 daily and have not seen these kinds of performance issues.

Leave it for more than a day, and the memory leaks will drive it into absolute uselessness.

I've had the camera spend 5-10 seconds to launch, then spending 3-4 seconds per picture ... which it ended up not saving.

Android 6.x has some serious memory-management issues as far as I can tell, because the Nexus 6P owners I've talked to online does not have these issues, but they have 50% more juggle room for memory leaks and to work around memory-fragmentation issues.

I'm having issues with pictures not saving on an LG g3. It seems that pictures only get saved after its done processing (5s or so), and if one shuts off the screen before that it just forgets it. Such an odd big bug to exist in 2016.

This. 10000 times this. I really, really hope that Windows 10 wins this battle. It provides the best of both worlds. We can have snappy performance (iOS) while having access to the file system.

> while having access to the file system.

Android has easy access to the file system. You can download one of many file managers.

What I meant was that Windows can have the good parts of both iOS and Android. To be clear: it can run as smooth as iOS while letting me access the file system as Android does. Another rant on Android: Developing apps for it is so bad... The guy that thought it was a good idea to destroy and recreate an Activity's after orientation changes should be fired. iOS's approach is 10000 times easier and faster

EDIT: Corrected when I said Activity's UI was destroyed to the Activity itself

One possible contributing factor is that the Android app switcher is a cluttered mess. On phones, instead of Chrome having some sort of tab manager in the app, you wind up with one entry in the app switcher for every single tab you leave open as you switch to other apps. The same occurs with the Google search app. So the app switcher becomes more a cluttered stack of browser and search history than a proper app switcher.

You can disable that in Chrome (which brings back the swipe down gesture to open the tab switcher, which is nice). However, the way the Google Search app interacts with the app switcher and back button is awful and there's no option to fix it. For example, using the app switcher to go back to a voice action result will often re-execute the action. Or sometimes no entry gets added to the back stack, so you can't go back to a results page. Or sometimes clicking something in the results opens Chrome and sometimes it doesn't. I just avoid the search app whenever possible and use Chrome.

I could go on about the clusterfuck that is "OK Google", but maybe I should stop now before I get too worked up.

Nice! Thanks for the heads up. I must have missed that when I hunted for it a while back.

I love that feature. I use the web way more than apps, so having web pages in the app switcher is awesome for me. I wish I could have several YouTube app tabs in the app switcher too.

It might be useful if it got it right. Say per-website. Instead you wind up with 10 different Facebook entries - or whatever website you happen to use a lot.

I actually prefer this feature, and even searched for a similar option in Firefox. Either way, it can be easily disabled in the Chrome settings by toggling the 'Merge tabs and apps' option.

Consider using Opera, it's so much better. It's the only mobile browser I know that does text reflow, which is essential for me.

Add to this Firefox which has reader-mode, which I consider to be absolutely superior to anything I've seen in any other browser.

Is that issue wrt to Nexus 5X? I had used N4 and now use One X both gave me very smooth experience.

You should consider freeing up some device space, it worked wonders for me.

Weirdly enough, this may be a valid suggestion.

EXT4 seems to have some odd behavior when the partition it is trying to work with to nears full.

I think you're describing a separate issue.

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.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/the-pixel-cs-bumpy-ro...

A ChromeOS tablet probably would've been a better end-product as far as a productivity tablet goes. The problem is that ChromeOS's app selection is pitiful for entertainment apps, and I suppose Google figured that no one would pay $500 for a "premium" productivity tablet when a cheap clamshell Chromebook would work nearly as well.

That has been Google's problem ever since ChromeOS went from being a "can it work?" research project to something they wanted to monetize.

If you look at the timeline, Android was poised to go "productive" with the 3.x for tablets. But at that very time the first Chromebooks hit the market, and the push was strongly towards the corporate (their unveiling even had a demo of Citrix client support).

I can't help speculate that there was some backroom jousting between Rubin (Android) and Pichai (ChromeOS) about who should carry the corporate push, with Pichai winning and Rubin moving to X-labs.

It seems that Google has renewed their focus on productive Android recently though, in large part thanks to incorporating Samsung's Knox tech and such.

This likely because even though ChromeOS is a lovely "terminal", its not a phone platform.

Bascially the corporate world lacks a proper upgrade path from Windows CE/Mobile that has been powering all manner of mobile devices. Going Android would allow quite a bit of flexibility, and choice in equipment suppliers.

It would not surprise me that as with the previous Pixel, the Pixel C is as much for Google internal use as it is for retail. As i recall, the Chromebook Pixel was in part a push to provide an alternative to Macbooks for Google employees (i swear that Google may well be Apple's biggest corporate customer, possibly tied with Facebook).

Don't forget IBM in the list of apples corporate customers.

Not so much dug up as (wildly) speculated based on circumstantial data.

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.

They're based around a Tegra X1 SoC aren't they? I know Nvidia releases Linux for their X1 devkits ( https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/linux-tegra ). Dunno what else is in the Pixel-C hardware wise, but at least that gives me some hope. I'd consider buying one if you could put a real Linux distro on it.

Yes, let's see. It's really nice hardware. The only slight annoyance is the lack of some standard keys.

Perhaps Surface 3 (non-pro) could be a good alternative. It's x86, but getting Linux running there is tricky too. [1]

[1] http://reddit.com/r/surfacelinux

Nope, Tegra X1 support for the mainline Linux is already being done as we speak (by NVIDIA themselves): http://www.spinics.net/lists/devicetree/msg109053.html

Great, I'm glad to be proven wrong. I asked on #coreboot and people were quite pessimistic.

People are running Ubuntu on Nvidia Shield TV (Tegra X1) and tablet (Tegra K1). Nvidia has L4T (Linux for Tegra) officially, since they want to push the Tegra boards to robotics etc, where people of course want to run a full Linux.

CUDA compatible too which is nice.

I think there will be an X1 powered tablet from Nvidia this year, hopefully priced better than the Pixel C

I'd be interested on Linux on Tegra X1, but only if it's a clamshell.

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.

I follow you on everything else but

>> most apps only run in portrait mode

What? That's not even remotely true. I think out of the hundred or so apps I have on my Android tablet, there might be one that is stuck in portrait mode.

My apology this is what I inferred from reading review of it, on The Verge: "It gets worse with third-party apps. The Pixel C wants to be used in landscape mode, but too many apps assume that they’re on phones. Popular apps like Slack, Twitter, and many more toss you into portrait mode even when the keyboard is attached."

From Ars Technica: "A new entry of late is the "pillarboxed phone app," which is made by designers that see the above issue and say "No problem! We'll put big margins on the left and right of the screen! It's a tablet app now!"

Issues like this with one of the first Android tablets/netbook-convertibles (the TF101, running original Honeycomb 3.0) drove me to develop this app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.kjonigsen....

I see from the discussion here that it is obviously still needed.

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.

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.

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...

It's called Pixel instead of Nexus, (it's running Android), so it's confusing to many people, on the market positioning side...

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.

If Google apps are not supporting tablets correctly, why should we?

The original Google Pixel was so named for the following reasons:

1) It was developed in-house at Google

2) It reflected the hi-DPI of the screen.

Evidently they decided to turn "Pixel" into a brand, and I suppose they figured that the in-house tablet they developed warranted the title (if you look at the thing, its aluminum design does resemble the panel half of a Chromebook Pixel).

So I suppose they now use the Pixel brand to either represent that style or to indicate that it's in-house hardware.

> So I suppose they now use the Pixel brand to either represent that style or to indicate that it's in-house hardware.

The latter. [1]

"Pixel is Google designed hardware; Nexus is hardware we work closely with partners to design"

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3w3x7p/hi_im_andrew_h...

Also the Chromebook Pixel may have been an attempt to get Google employees to use something other than Macbooks.

Meaning that it may be in part aimed at dogfooding the Android platform internally, much like how Microsoft employees run beta version of their software to root out early bugs and such.

Also offering the device for sale may provide some means of covering the expense of having them made, as usually factories demand certain minimum amount ordered before they start a production run.

> Also the Chromebook Pixel may have been an attempt to get Google employees to use something other than Macbooks.

I think it's most likely due to Apple's weak enterprise management tools for OS X [1] and the mid-2009 cyber attack on Google (Operation Aurora [2]) which was the result of one or more Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerabilities.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/27/google_mac_support/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora

It all makes sense if when you are confused by what Google does, just remember this: we are Google's beta testers and what we test might or might not be a real product some day.

In other words, Google doesn't have much of a strategy other than throw a bunch of stuff against a wall and see what sticks.

Yeah, much like the Surface Book which was a home run. Oh wait...

http://www.google.com/search?q=problems+with+my+surface+book

I said nothing about MS or the Surface. Not sure why you are making a snarky comment, as if I did.

Snarky? Your comment was nothing but.

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.

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