One year later: Can Android 7.0 Nougat save the Pixel C?

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The Pixel C tablet has had a tough life. Under its code name of “Ryu,” the Pixel C started life in the Chrome OS open source repository, seemingly indicating that at one point it was meant to run Chrome OS. Google was experimenting with a touchscreen interface for Chrome OS to the point that an on-screen keyboard (which is mostly useless on a laptop) shipped in the stable version. A finished version of an “all-touch” Chrome OS never materialized, though, and we ended up with a Pixel C running regular Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

The result was a “productivity” device that couldn’t multitask. You could type like a champ with the Pixel C’s keyboard, but the one-app-at-a-time nature of Android made things like referencing information while typing pretty much impossible. The Pixel C was all the more disappointing because we knew a split screen mode was coming—a “highly experimental” version of the feature debuted in Marshmallow’s developer preview.

Split screen wasn’t ready for the Pixel C’s launch, though, which just fueled the feeling that the C was a half-baked device with software that wasn’t ready for the hardware it was running on. There were other bad signs, too—the tablet had a whopping four microphones on top, which seemed to indicate it was built for some kind of killer voice recognition system, but it didn’t even support always-on Google voice commands at launch.

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Source: Ars Technica – One year later: Can Android 7.0 Nougat save the Pixel C?