Pixel C Reviews Show Android for Tablets Is Still a Work in Progress

In 2011, Google released Honeycomb, a version of Android that the company marketed as being designed specifically for tablets. Reviews of Honeycomb were mixed, with tech website TechRepublic later writing that Android tablets had "failed" in part because the mobile operating system wasn't well-suited to the large screen of a tablet, primarily because there was a lack of high-quality apps.

Four years later, Google's efforts to make Android truly sing on tablets are still a work in progress.

The company on Tuesday released the Pixel C, a $499 Android tablet that reviewers at publications like the Wall Street Journal and Wiredhave compared to the iPad Pro and Microsoft Surface. It's a tablet, but one that's supposed to be just as useable inside a spreadsheet app as it is scrolling through Netflix. Many of the same complaints from 2011 have carried over.

Apps that were originally designed for Android smartphones, according to Wired, don't scale up well to the Pixel C's 10.2-inch display—and that's if they scale up "at all." The result is apps clumsily blown up to fit the large display instead of being purposefully built with the extra real estate in mind. Images in Slack's app, according to the Wall Street Journal, were "stretched and distorted" to fit the size of the display. The WSJ also noted that websites tended to load their mobile-optimized versions rather than their desktop-optimized versions, which is hardly ideal for a device that's being marketed as being "designed to do it all." Add in the lack of split-screen support (which lets you run two different apps side-by-side), and you've got the feeling that Android still feels first and foremost like software designed for a smartphone.

The release of the Pixel C comes just a few weeks after Google was forced to refute a story, first reported in the in the Wall Street Journal, that it was planning to merge Android and Chrome OS, the operating system that powers Chromebooks. At the time, Google said it was "working on ways to bring together the best of both operating systems," but perhaps the smartest play is to keep them distinct entities.