 We are in Mountain View, California at Google's headquarters, and the reason we're here is to get a look at the all-new Pixel Slate. That's right, Google is finally getting back into making tablets again, but here's a question. Why now? This is a Pixel Slate. It is a tablet running Chrome OS made, of course, by Google. So let's get into some of the hardware specs before we get really into what's going on with this thing. So it is about 7 millimeters thick, it weighs about 1.6 pounds, and just looking at the dimensions of this thing, the nicest part about it is it's very well balanced, like right in the center there. So when you hold it, it doesn't feel as big as these large 12-inch tablets usually feel. There are two front-facing speakers and they get very loud and they sound very good, and there's a fingerprint sensor on the power button. But the thing you really care about when you're looking at a tablet is the screen, and this screen, it's beautiful. It is 3K by 2K, which is 3000 pixels by 2000 pixels. I like this aspect ratio, I think it really works, and there's a lot of very advanced things about the way that this screen works that I'm not going to try and repeat here. We're using a new technology that we built a custom design for that uses low-temperature polycrystalline silicon to deliver much brighter, much more rapid. Technically, you're moving the electrons a hundred times faster, which allows us to light up the screen much more efficiently. Other things to note, there are two USB-C ports, one on either side, which is convenient if you want to plug in a power cord on either side, or if you want to plug in, I don't know, two things into your tablet. Crazy town. But you'll notice as I spin it around, I see those two ports, we see a keyboard connector on the bottom. You know what we don't see? We don't see a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack. One of the trends that we're really seeing is the advent of many more Bluetooth accessories, particularly for audio. With the phones leading the charge in terms of that transition, more people own those types of devices today, and as a result, they wanted a single product that they can use on both their devices. I see. So you figure everybody already went out and bought Bluetooth headphones because they had to with their phones, and so why not just make them use it with the tablet also? And for compatibility, we're including the adapter in the box. Pricing on this thing starts at $599, and that is for a version of this thing which has a Celeron processor, 4 gigs of RAM, and 32 gigs of storage. But you can price this thing all the way up to 1600 bucks, which gets you a 8th generation Core i7 Y-series Intel processor, 16 gigs of RAM, and 250 gigs of storage. Of course, if you're going to use this thing as your main work computer, and you probably could, you're going to want a keyboard. So Google has this thing which has been sitting down underneath it. It is the Pixel Slate keyboard. You open it up like this, and then the back slides down into this little mode here, and they put magnets on the back, and there's a couple of strong ones on the top and on the bottom to lock it into those positions, but you can also have it work at any of the angles in between, which is pretty convenient. But it's not great for lapability, so if you put it on your lap it can be a little bit wobbly because the keyboard doesn't lock up to the front of the tablet. It's kind of a little bit wobbly here. The other thing you might notice about the keyboard is, hey, it's backlit. Backlit keyboards on Chromebooks are disturbingly rare, but this one's got it. And also the keys are round, which is an interesting design decision. When we first saw the round keys, we were a little skeptical. Yeah, and I am right now. I like the way they look. Okay. But we started doing user testing. We did extensive user testing on between round keys and square keys, and found that after a short learning curve, users accuracy increased. So the actual number of times that your finger can miss type by pressing multiple keys at the same time is smaller because there's fewer places where there's overlap. Okay, as for the rest of the hardware things, it's got a couple of far-field microphones on the top, it's got 8 megapixel camera on the back and the front, and the one on the front is wide-angle and apparently works really well in low-light, so you can do your video conferences in the dark. Now Google's made some interesting choices with the software on this, so when you take it off of the keyboard, it automatically jumps into a tablet mode, so your stuff can go full screen, but you can still, you know, drag them around. You can make and go and have these screens here in this mode here, but when you put it back into the keyboard and the magnet connects there, it just jumps right back into the mode where you really control everything with the mouse and the touchpad. So I haven't had a ton of time with the PixelSlate obviously, but I am impressed. I am not feeling really limited by this thing at all as a tablet, especially when there's a keyboard attached. I am sure that I could be just as effective using this as I would be with a medium to high-end Pixelbook, which is kind of an achievement for a tablet. And again, as a tablet, it is big. It's a big tablet, but there's something about it that doesn't feel quite as large as other tablets in this range. It's a little bit lighter. It's nowhere near as light as an iPad, of course, but it also runs a full desktop browser, which the iPad doesn't, so. Taking Chrome OS and making a tablet out of it was a really obvious thing for Google to do, and so Google did the obvious thing. And I haven't had a chance to really use it yet, but I think they did a pretty good job of it. I really can't wait to review it. If you've been watching my videos for any length of time, you know that I just keep talking about the future of computing, and I really don't feel like anybody's gotten the balance exactly right. So the Surface Pro feels a little bit too PC-like and the iPad feels a little bit too tablet-like, but this Pixel Slate, it feels like it does a better job of striking that balance almost exactly 50-50, and I don't know if that's exactly what you want, but it's fascinating that they've done such a good job making this thing feel so much like a tablet, but also be able to do PC stuff. Are we synced? We do need a slate. Yeah. Actually... Ah, look at that! Okay, so you're making a tablet. Wait, you're making a slate. Why are you making a slate? You know, over the years, we started with clamshells, but as we sort of saw where users are going, touch became more important. That's why we added touch. Then we built convertibles because people wanted the flexibility of having something they could hold in their hand and being closer to them, and then obviously Slate is the next logical step there, and it really is about flexibility for the end user. Also, just in general, it is an important market. So is Google done making Android tablets? It's been a while, and now you're making a Chrome OS tablet that happens to run Android apps, to be clear, but is this the future of what you think big screen computing from Google should look like? This is where we're investing. From a full desktop productivity perspective, we believe having a full desktop browser is actually much better for the use cases you have on the web. Eight years now, we've been saying Android apps are not so good on tablets. What do you think the state of that is? How quickly, like, where do you think it's going when we run Android apps on this thing? But we've been working very closely with all the top app vendors, and they have been doing a lot of optimizations right now, whether it's Adobe, for example, has been optimizing a lot of their apps. I think there's still, again, plenty of room for improvement, but we're also doing things at the platform level to make it easier for app developers so that they don't have to even think about some of this stuff. So that's everything we know so far about the Pixel Slate, but I want to go back to that original question, which is why did Google make this thing now? Well, there's three points. The first is that I think consumers are finally ready to accept this idea of a hybrid device. We've been watching the iPad become more like a PC over the year, and we've been watching the Surface, you know, Go and the Surface Pro become more consumer friendly. The second point is that Google had to do a lot of work to make Chrome OS better on a tablet, and it is way more usable in tablet mode now than it was the last time that we looked at it. Third, and maybe most importantly, Google had to get better at making hardware. They had to make those Pixel phones, they had to make the Pixelbook, and a lot of the stuff that they've learned is built into the Pixel Slate. It just, it feels like a really nice kind of premium device. So the answer to that question, why now, is really really simple. Google was just ready. Do I wish that they had done it sooner? Yeah, sure, of course I do, but you know what? Better Slate than never. Thanks so much for watching. That was David Pierce from the Wall Street Journal. I'm Dieter Bohn from The Verge, obviously. You should subscribe to The Verge, not to that guy over there. Over there. Wherever he went.