Detroit wrote: ↑Thu Jun 14, 2018 10:28 am
JP, how's the Pixelbook so far? Still good? Pretty sure I'm going to pick one up before the sale ends on Monday.
Good and bad
First, it's fast as hell. Wakes literally instantly just like a phone. The light OS keeps all the processing power available for whatever app you're using.
Keyboard is a strong point, very easy to type quickly on. Better than the new macbooks.
Screen is crystal clear and just as good as the macbooks I looked at. Resolution is adjustable, so I upped the resolution for some more real estate. It's maybe a bit small for what I wanted but that's all personal preference. Touch screen is fast and responds like a phone. I don't have the
pen.
It's light. And thin as hell. Easy to carry around. Battery lasts about 6-8 hours? Not sure I haven't tested this out fully. But it was easy to pack this for the week just by throwing it in my backpack, and was super helpful at the hotel. I might not have brought my MBP due to its size and weight.
Bluetooth connection is much stronger than it was on my MBP. Paired to bluetooth speakers very quickly.
The bad.... the OS is certainly neutered compared to Apple and MS. I prefer the apple OS honestly. Some things are simple, some things are unnecessarily hard. Like... file storage is a pain. File transfer is a pain without a USB drive. It uses USB-C so none of my flash drives work on it. Theoretically I can load my music on it but
haven't figured that out yet because file transfer is NGH right now. It's unclear which apps and files work offline too. Navigating that is harder than it should be, because they just assume you'll be connected to the internet regardless on this thing. Also for some reason I can't seem to sync what's on this computer with my Google drive which is
Gotta do it manually which is bs because my apple will sync automatically.
Other peculiarities. The search thing searches the web and the computer. You find apps same way as you'd find the weather. Which is confusing because for example spotify has a web site which looks like an app in the search, but the spotify app is a different thing but the icon looks exactly the same. I have 2 spotify icons in my app menu thing and one is a web browser link and the other is a full app and I don't know which is which. Apps for andriods work on this which is nice, but they're small and shaped like a phone screen would be because phone app. You can run them full screen which helps but they're still touch finger based and not ideal for track pad and clicking. They do work though. And the apps down by where the "start" menu is for windows are either links or apps who knows which is which. I wish they'd have the actual applications segregated from the hyperlinks.
Another app oddity. There is no file bar on top of the app window. So if you're multitasking and want to bring up the other app and you click anywhere on it, it's active and will click to whatever that thing is. Gotta alt+tab to switch between apps or you'll inadvertently click something you didn't want to.
I tried to watch movies on this on the airplane. Alaska Air uses a system called GoGo. Web browser to find a movie, a separate app to watch it. So on the flight out I tried it and got an error saying my browser (my version of chrome) is unsupported. Bummer. Watched shit on my phone instead. So coming back I pre-downloaded firefox, which worked in full screen mode to select a movie. YAY! But then I forgot to download the separate GoGo app. It downloaded through Firefox but the computer wouldn't allow it to open the installer because a non-chrome app downloaded it.
Tried to download it through the google play store which didn't work on the plane. So.... back to the phone. I guess this is a security feature, which is potentially a great thing, but man that's annoying as shit and you wouldn't have that issue on Mac or Windows OS.
I dunno.
But anyway. For just browsing internet this thing is a freaking champ.