Google finally held its much-anticipated hardware press event today and unveiled a whole lot of products including the Pixel 2 phones. One of the unique products announced at the event is the Pixelbook laptop which was accompanied by a stylus pen which it dubbed Pixelbook Pen. The Pixelbook doesn’t come as much of a surprise as the Home Max smart speaker which had not appeared in leaks before now, at least only the Home Mini was expected. The Google Pixelbook and Clip camera had earlier appeared in a retailer inventory spotted a couple of days back.
The Pixelbook is touted as Google’s thinnest and lightest laptop till date, weighing just 1.1kg (about 2.4 pounds) and having a 10.33mm thickness. The new Google laptop comes with a 12.3-inch Quad HD LCD touchscreen display with 235 PPI on top an aluminium unibody. The notebook features rotatable hinges which can spin around 360 degrees, thereby turning the notebook laptop into a tablet. The 2-in-1 laptop packs a durable battery which Google says can last up to 10 hours of continuous usage and that is not all, it has support for fast charging which can deliver a battery capacity that can last up to 2 hours in just 15 minutes. The Pixelbook features a variant with an Intel Kaby Lake Core i5, 8GB of RAM, 128 GB of storage and another with the same processor but 256 GB of storage. There is also a topmost variant with an Intel Core i7 chip, 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB. The device also packs a backlit keyboard that illuminates in low light.
One thing that stood out on all the products Google announced is their AI capabilities which integrates AI with software and hardware which Google claims was designed from the inside out, thus giving the AI deep learning capability. One way this is integrated on the Pixelbook is in the aspect of having Google Assistant which can be accessed by just saying “Ok Google” or by pressing the dedicated Assistant key. The Smart Assistant allows users to set a reminder, look up a score of your favourite sports team, find an email, and do other stuff on their notebook. The Pixelbook also smartly connects automatically to the Pixel phone’s mobile data in the absence of a Wi-Fi network. This saves users the stress of turning on the hotspot on the Pixel phone.
Pixelbook Pen
The Pixelbook Pen is designed as an accessory to work with the Pixelbook touchscreen display. The $99 Pixelbook Pen was designed in partnership with Japanese tablet manufacturer, Wacom and it has 10 ms of latency, 60 degrees of angular awareness and over 2,000 of pressure sensitivity. You can use it for various tasks including circling an image or text in order to look up a word or find out more about a picture.
Pricing & Availability
The Pixelbook and Pixelbook Pen will be available first in the US, Canada and the UK. As for the pricing, the laptop starts at $999 for the variant with an Intel Kaby Lake Core i5, 8GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage. The higher Pixelbook with 256 GB of storage will sell for $1,199. The topmost variant with an Intel Core i7 chip, 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage costs $1,699. Pre-orders for all variants has commenced and the notebook will ship on October 31.
