I’ve wanted to replace my laptop for some time now. It’s a Lenovo U300s from 2012 and it has done a valiant job. I’ve tried countless Linux distros on it, done mountains of University work on it and lugged it all over the place.
These days my usage has changed. I don’t code on it. I don’t need to take it to University to do work. I use it to browse the web and to administer the few servers I’ve got running. I can do all of this from my tablet, at least in theory.
I have an Nexus 7 (the one with the matte black back) and I use that for watching video, controlling the Sonos or Chromecasting things to the TV. General browsing it quite nice on it but the screen is too small for doing terminal stuff and the external keyboards I’ve tried are frankly a bit crappy.
So I want a larger tablet that has a decent physical keyboard. Then I can sell my laptop and Nexus 7 and own less random tech.
Enter the Pixel C. It’s the Google competitor to the Microsoft Surface and it’s getting decent reviews. It was announced late last year and released not so long ago to a somewhat small fan fair. I was pretty excited initially but was taken aback by the price of the keyboard (£120) which you have to buy separately.
Well Dan Lynch got one and seems to love it, and informed me that the keyboard is actually pretty clever. It doubles as a case kinda thing and draws power from the tablet via magic wireless power. I can also return it within 15 days of the it arriving so that gives me some time to play with it to see if I like it.
I went for the 32GB version. That’s twice the space on my tablet and I’ve still not filled that. With the keyboard, the package is just north of £500. Pretty pricey for a tablet but the spec of the machine is great. That’s about what I wanted to spend on a laptop but for that price I don’t think I was going to get anything as snazzy as this. Hopefully I’ll be able to offset the cost by selling the old kit it replaces.
Anyway, I’ll hopefully spout my opinions on the thing when it arrives later this week. In the meantime I’m going to try to find some nice apps that are optimized for the Pixel C.