Google shot themselves in the face trying to make ChromeOS happen at the expense of making Android tablets that don't suck. Hell, Kindle tablets kinda do suck and they still sell fine.
I do wonder how many people buy Kindle Fires when they aren't on one of their $40 clearance sales. I've bought three or four of them that way.
They are, to be honest, pretty terrible, but for reading in the middle of the night when I can't turn on the light and use my regular Kindle, they beat using my phone.
Not at all. Although not fast growing, tablets are still great business. Not all people like to carry those monstrous phones in their pockets. Even if you do, its hard to enjoy details while streaming high def content, planning trip, reading books with pictures/diagrams, do email jujitsu, play high def games and so on. Tablets are far more popular among kids age < 10. I see the transition where laptops would be largely extinct and tablets with keyboard dock would be a norm. It has already happened but not yet full scale. The future user base would be divided between two groups where power users would own tablets + phone while more typical users would own only phone. Giving up on tablets entirely is unwise. Power users are minority but they have lions share of influence.
As an Android user, I liked my Nexus 7 at the time, but I received security updates for a year or two max, and then never bought an Android tablet again because of it.
My company at the time gave every staff member a Nexus 7. There was a ~50% failure rate after a year. Not a bad machine apart from that, but it soured me on Google hardware for the next half s decade.
I love my pixel slate, best tablet/laptop I ever had. Such a shame. The screen is great, the keyboard is surprisingly good and it's awesome to be able to ditch the keyboard for a while when reading docs etc.
Linux and Android apps mean I can run android studio and e.g. Lightroom (android version) as well as many games. I got back to playing some DOS games in dosbox.
You pretty much described me. There's a ton of software glitches, but I have a tablet that I can code on (running Linux), answer emails, run every Android app I need, and weighs far less then a laptop.
The keyboard design was quite poor compared to the Surface Pro in my opinion. It felt wobbly when carrying around too as it didn't magnetically keep the bottom part of the keyboard snapped to the display when shut closed.
I also don't feel it was light by any means. It weights almost a full 3 lbs with the keyboard attached. That's heavier than the Dell XPS 13 and much heavier than a Surface Pro 6.
FWIW, I love my PixelBook, and it's become my number 1 dev machine (runs the full Jetbrains suite, Postgres, etc. from Crostini), plus I just flip the screen all the way around and it turns into a tablet. Selfishly I hope this just means Pixelbooks get more love.
Google's tablet dreams died when they killed the Nexus line in favor of Pixel. Instead of making devices 95% as good as other flagships at half the price, they became the market-leader when it came to overcharging.
I was a huge fan of the Nexus 7 -- it's the device that changed how I looked at personal computers. I bought myself one, and ones for a couple of family members.
Within 3 years they were all unusably slow. Kept them going for a little while with some device resets, but eventually we just all had to give up on them. The family has been on iPads ever since and even the oldest of the bunch still run great (much thanks to iOS 12's perf improvements).
That's the whole story on how I got sold on Apple hardware.
Google bricked my 2013 Google I/O special edition Nexus 7 a month after they gave them to us. Can't say I had much confidence in Google devices after that.
I went from the Nexus 7 2013 to the shield tablet k1 when the updates stopped and the battery died. The shield tablet was well specced and the best supported android device I've used (even including the 2013 n7 and the n5x) but it's also bulkier than the n7 and it too is past its batteries good days.
There's not really a good option left for Android tablets sadly, so looks like my next one will be the surface go.
Yeah. I use mine to run ssh commands on my workstation/servers via Termux while in bed pretty much every night.
Also watch videos while on the treadmill via rclone's dlna server on vlc. It'll still run close to 4 hours of video on full brightness even after all these years.
It's an absolute shame Google failed to follow up on this device - very disappointing.
Very sad to see Google bailing out while iPad Pro and iPadOS is going stronger than ever. Honestly, this is the tipping point for me to switch from the Google ecosystem to the Apple ecosystem.
"ChromeOS/Android hybrids must have confused people"
It's not confusing at all. "It's a laptop and it can run android apps". It doesn't get any simpler. It's harder to explain to people why you can't run android apps on, say, a windows laptop.
x86 2-in-1 devices are so clearly superior to the Android and ChromeOS sort, that the latter just feel like a bad joke in comparison. I can't wait to be able to run a pure tablet device on mainline Linux and GNOME-Shell; this has become truly feasible only very recently, with GNOME 3.30 and 3.32. (Hopefully the PostmarketOS project will step in and support this on old Android tablets as well, but the huge amount of hardware variety just makes it hard to predict what models will be able to support this without resorting to ugly hacks, like using old vendor kernels and proprietary blobs, etc. etc.)
I have an 8.4" 16x10 tablet and I love it for media consumption. I ride the bus for over an hour each way. It's nice to be able to use the tablet for 2-3 hours a day and not drain the battery on my phone.
Google IO game dev track was a joke, versus what gets shown at WWDC or BUILD.
Google really doesn't get game development.
While Apple and Microsoft make frameworks, IDE tooling, and talk studios language, Google makes PR talks about their cloud services, does some intro level talks about middleware and shows how to do 3D with bare bones FOSS libraries and CLI tooling.
Stadia will surely fail if that is all they have to offer to game studios.
It's kind of their thing, really. Like Microsoft getting the first two of everything wrong. Google gets the second and all subsequent ones wrong, instead. Mostly...
Tablets were always the odd device out of the bag.
Too big to put in your pocket, and not nearly as productive as a laptop with a keyboard. They were fine as a toy or purely entertainment device for someone in the backseat of a car, but mostly a dead-end as far as tech advancements go.
The last Android tablet Google made was the Nexus 9, released in 2014. It was also the last tablet I bought.
The ChromeOS hybrid laptop-tablets are absolutely terrible - both the software and the hardware are miserable to use. I wish Google would just release a refreshed version of the Nexus 9. It's really all I want in a tablet.
The entire google OS stack is a mess. Most of the problems that the device manufactures are being blamed for can be traced back to the core model.
AKA the idea that the firmware/os/drivers are all bundled together and hacked to work on a given device simply doesn't scale. Its employment for engineers because very security patch, every upstream refactor, requires all those closed source patches to be rebased on the latest version. This might work ok if the underlying technology (linux) didn't change their driver APIs at the drop of the hat, or the device manufactures didn't play throw darts at the soup of ARM interconnects, ram controllers, and devices, everytime they spun a new generation of phones/tablets/chromebooks.
Apple can get away with the monolithic model because they have a half dozen fairly similar devices to support. There are android manufactures which have released more devices in the last 6 months.
Yah, google is trying to fix that, but without a hard line in the sand with respect to pushing non-core OS/driver functionality into standardized runtime firmware APIs (think powermgmt) and locking down the driver API (userspace or otherwise) and assuring that it takes a long time for API's to be replaced/upgraded/deprecated. The hardware/upgrade story will continue to be a mess.
The Nexus 9 was awful. It was very slow and lagged all the time. I think it was due to the Nvidia CPU as I've also had a Chromebook with an Nvidia CPU and it's also really slow.
[+] [-] cwyers|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrower123|6 years ago|reply
They are, to be honest, pretty terrible, but for reading in the middle of the night when I can't turn on the light and use my regular Kindle, they beat using my phone.
[+] [-] jayd16|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] osrec|6 years ago|reply
I know they're not great now, but perhaps foldables will kill tablets all together?
It may actually be a smart move to unbloat the product lines a little.
[+] [-] simonh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytelus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emilfihlman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodgerd|6 years ago|reply
This is Google failing, not the lack of a market.
[+] [-] hyperpallium|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhanschoo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sylens|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billsix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robin_reala|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|6 years ago|reply
Google made a decision to stop selling cheap tablets.
[+] [-] simula67|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muro|6 years ago|reply
It's fast, light and very well manufactured.
[+] [-] metal13|6 years ago|reply
Though I got back into NES games, not DOS (yet!)
[+] [-] sahaskatta|6 years ago|reply
I also don't feel it was light by any means. It weights almost a full 3 lbs with the keyboard attached. That's heavier than the Dell XPS 13 and much heavier than a Surface Pro 6.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pureliquidhw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbm-vic-20|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artimaeis|6 years ago|reply
Within 3 years they were all unusably slow. Kept them going for a little while with some device resets, but eventually we just all had to give up on them. The family has been on iPads ever since and even the oldest of the bunch still run great (much thanks to iOS 12's perf improvements).
That's the whole story on how I got sold on Apple hardware.
[+] [-] kenhwang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Macha|6 years ago|reply
There's not really a good option left for Android tablets sadly, so looks like my next one will be the surface go.
[+] [-] izzydata|6 years ago|reply
I don't want a phablet so it is difficult for me to combine my phone device with my media consumption device.
[+] [-] atomi|6 years ago|reply
It's an absolute shame Google failed to follow up on this device - very disappointing.
[+] [-] Goronmon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plotteddancer16|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dan_quixote|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haunter|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btreecat|6 years ago|reply
Please make a follow up to the Nexus 9.
[+] [-] akmarinov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goodcjw2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ulfw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamnotacrook|6 years ago|reply
It's not confusing at all. "It's a laptop and it can run android apps". It doesn't get any simpler. It's harder to explain to people why you can't run android apps on, say, a windows laptop.
[+] [-] 0815test|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] just_myles|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pravda|6 years ago|reply
On one I cracked the screen (still works!, sorta) and on the other the USB jack broke (broke it even more trying to solder in a replacement).
Inexpensive and rootable. Can you root an iPad?
[+] [-] awill|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessedotexe|6 years ago|reply
I think sleek chromebooks or large phones are the better way forward.
[+] [-] oarabbus_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|6 years ago|reply
Google really doesn't get game development.
While Apple and Microsoft make frameworks, IDE tooling, and talk studios language, Google makes PR talks about their cloud services, does some intro level talks about middleware and shows how to do 3D with bare bones FOSS libraries and CLI tooling.
Stadia will surely fail if that is all they have to offer to game studios.
[+] [-] ncmncm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|6 years ago|reply
Because only they understand that the killer feature of tablet is being the new laptops, and not just bigger phones.
Also for hobby development on the go, iOS or Windows stack are more fun to use than the whole Studio + J++ + NDK maintained as 20% project.
[+] [-] antisthenes|6 years ago|reply
Too big to put in your pocket, and not nearly as productive as a laptop with a keyboard. They were fine as a toy or purely entertainment device for someone in the backseat of a car, but mostly a dead-end as far as tech advancements go.
[+] [-] chimeracoder|6 years ago|reply
The ChromeOS hybrid laptop-tablets are absolutely terrible - both the software and the hardware are miserable to use. I wish Google would just release a refreshed version of the Nexus 9. It's really all I want in a tablet.
[+] [-] StillBored|6 years ago|reply
AKA the idea that the firmware/os/drivers are all bundled together and hacked to work on a given device simply doesn't scale. Its employment for engineers because very security patch, every upstream refactor, requires all those closed source patches to be rebased on the latest version. This might work ok if the underlying technology (linux) didn't change their driver APIs at the drop of the hat, or the device manufactures didn't play throw darts at the soup of ARM interconnects, ram controllers, and devices, everytime they spun a new generation of phones/tablets/chromebooks.
Apple can get away with the monolithic model because they have a half dozen fairly similar devices to support. There are android manufactures which have released more devices in the last 6 months.
Yah, google is trying to fix that, but without a hard line in the sand with respect to pushing non-core OS/driver functionality into standardized runtime firmware APIs (think powermgmt) and locking down the driver API (userspace or otherwise) and assuring that it takes a long time for API's to be replaced/upgraded/deprecated. The hardware/upgrade story will continue to be a mess.
[+] [-] farmerbb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexdumitru|6 years ago|reply