Shiny and Chrome

For a while now I've been using my old, resurrected Pixel C tablet as a little accessory device in my office. I use it for playing music, IMing with friends, and so on.

This was working fine... ish. But there were problems.

First off, this tablet is old as stink. It was first released in 2015 to much fanfare, but it didn't last particularly long, both in sales and updates. The major problem was that nVidia yeeted themselves out of the mobile processor market and their interest in maintaining the Android kernel for the processor in this tablet almost immediately went to zero. So, the Android version on this thing is a wee bit old.

But there's other problems. You might notice there's two keyboards here. The keyboard case that came with the tablet works "fine", but has an issue where it goes to sleep pretty quickly and takes something like 5 seconds to reconnect to the tablet when it wakes up. This makes it incredibly useless for an IM device, and so I've been using my (discontinued) Logitech Solar Bluetooth Keyboard instead. It also doesn't connect particularly swiftly, but it at least stays connected a lot longer.

The real killer, though, is that the tablet is just slow and clumsy as all hell. The world has apparently moved on over the past 7 or 8 years, and this tablet has not kept up. Not to mention that Android apps in general don't get a whole lot of polish, and Android tablet apps even less, and Android tablet apps when using a keyboard less still... It wasn't a good experience, let's just say.

So off to Amazon we go.

This is a Lenovo Chromebook Flex 5i model 82M7004CUX with an 11th gen Intel i3 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. It's actually a slightly older model, but for $300 it was a pretty good deal.

For whatever reason, the white balance on the camera on my iPhone goes really nuts when taking photos of the screen, or of anything where the screen is present somewhere in the shot.

Anyway, I had to pause and contemplate this set-up screen for a moment. What if the laptop is for me, but I am a child inside? I wasn't prepared for this level of deep introspection on a Saturday morning.

While supposedly being a laptop, it also does tricks if you snap the spine and flip it around. Combined with the android compatibility and built-in touch screen, I can relive those heady days of awful Android tablet apps all over again.

Ok, let's just forget that feature exists, and see about fixing the colour temperature of the screen.

Phew, that's a little better.

But enough of that, the real question is: does it run Doom Skyrim?

Why yes, yes it does.

I mean, sort of. The framerate is respectable, but for some reason there's a lot of input latency. It didn't feel especially good to play. I'll be keeping an eye on future developments here I guess.

Or, more likely, I'll completely forget about it and just use this for playing music and IMing with friends in my office.