 I don't know if you've noticed, but it seems like everybody's trying to do something new with tablets this year. And Google's getting in on the act too. They're actually making their own tablet for the first time. And it's this good looking little guy, the Pixel C. So how is this Android tablet different from all the other new tablets out there? Well, first off, it's made by Google's Pixel team, which means it looks like a Chromebook Pixel. It's got a great design, thick aluminum, straight edges, and a sense of monolithic ruggedness. You can even tap on the top to check your battery life. It is a little thick, about a quarter of an inch. But I don't really mind that though, because I'm on team battery. And so far, I haven't had any problem using the Pixel C all day long. But really, what sets this $499 Android tablet apart is that you can get this $149 Android keyboard to go with it. It's actually a really impressive feat of engineering once you figure out how it all fits together. The keyboard is Bluetooth, but it connects up to a tablet with a really strong magnet and an even stronger hinge. So you have a full 90 degrees of angles to use it at. When you close it all up, the tablet wirelessly charges the keyboard, so you never even have to plug the thing in. And this is one of the better Bluetooth keyboards I've ever used. Google actually eliminated a few of the keys on the left and right edge, which means that the ones remaining can be a little bit bigger. It's not quite a full-size keyboard, but the keys that you actually type on are big enough and deep enough to let you jam along at speed. So those are the tricks. And the specs are pretty good, too. It has a high-resolution 10.2-inch screen and two really loud speakers. It's got three gigs of RAM and a fairly speedy Nvidia processor. There's even an array of four microphones up top, so you can bark, OK, Google, from across the room and have it respond to your commands. So Google's hardware team is clearly ready for the future of tablet computing. But Google's Android and developer teams, they just can't keep up. The Pixel C runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow, and Android needs some serious help when it comes to being productive on tablets. There's no way to do split-screen with any app. And now that Windows, iOS, and even Samsung are doing it, it seems like a really stupid thing to be missing. That's even weirder, because the Pixel has an aspect ratio of the square root of two on the screen, which is theoretically perfect for cutting it in half and maintaining that same ratio. And I could even forgive all that if it weren't for the fact that there are little delays when I tap the screen to jump between apps, and sometimes even within apps. If you have to go one app at a time, it needs to be really fast switching between them. And it's just not. It seems like there's just more optimization work to be done here. Even this fancy keyboard sometimes has issues communicating with Android. Sometimes I get missed or even repeating key presses. It doesn't get better inside most apps, because very few of them take advantage of the tablet size. Even some of Google's own apps feel like just wide expanses of wasted space. Heck, even Google Docs seems to think that I'm on a phone. It has this new research feature, but it splits the screen vertically instead of horizontally. I could look past all of that if I knew that apps from third-party developers were optimized for tablets, but basically none of them are. In fact, a lot of them, including really popular stuff like Slack, Instagram, and Twitter, they throw up screens that kick you into portrait mode even when the keyboard is attached in landscape. It's infuriating. At the end of the day, I just don't know what the Pixel C is trying to be. Maybe it's a development platform for Google employees? Whatever it is, it's certainly not something that most people should buy. At $650 for the whole package, you can find way, way better value by going with another tablet. So, the Pixel team may have done a pretty good job here of rethinking what an Android tablet could be, but until the rest of Google puts more thought into making Android better on tablets, just engineering great hardware isn't enough.