The Almost PERFECT Chromebook? Google Pixelbook Go Review

 Hi everyone,

This is the pixel book go I’ve been using it for the past week and a half or so and I really enjoy the experience you’ll see it just unlocked it by me looking at the pixel and then it unlocked it on the display here now I have had some issues with the device itself and as you can see it’s in this weird state right now so the bar is down at the bottom and that’s fine but there’s just nothing on the display for some reason so I have had a couple of these issues while using it for the most

part though it’s been a good experience so let me go ahead and restart this and get this to where its working properly but I wanted to show you that because it’s not behaving properly right now so let me go ahead and turn it back on now.

I’m at the home screen and I wanted to show you that it locked up on me before and kind of did some weird things and this is about the third time. 

That’s happened in the period of a couple weeks so it’s not a common occurrence but it does happen from time to time and so I wanted to show you that the good thing is that Google is quick to fix these sort of things with updates that are pretty seamless and occasionally you’ll have to reboot it’s not a big deal but the first thing I want to talk about is what’s great about the pixel book go and then we’ll talk about what’s bad about the pixel book go so the first thing is

the design and it looks pretty simple it’s a straightforward laptop here its magnesium it has a nice cold touch to it and it’s a simple black color you also can get it in not pink but it’s just a simple design overall but what.

They’ve done is make it a little bit more fun because the bottom has this ripple effect on the bottom and this helps it stick to your lap you’ve got rubber bumpers both back and front and then this ripple part here just helps it stick a little bit better and then on the side you have your USB for charging or drives and things like that you’ve got a status indicator and then also a headphone jack on the other side or the right side you just have another charger with a little status indicator so you can charge it on either side which is really nice so overall the design is simple but it’s what you want for a Chrome book or any laptop really and its super thin and portable. 

So I really like the design of it overall as simple as it is it’s very functional and that leads me on to the inside design which is great it’s very much like you would expect a great trackpad that’s glass has a nice clicky feel to it well come back to this in a moment and then you have probably the best keyboard on any pixel book I’ve used or any pixel I’ve used this reminds me very much of maybe a surface book or surface laptop or the new MacBook Pro so you have about the same key throw it’s got a very tactile feel and it works really well let me go ahead and unlock it and I love that you can use your phone to unlock it so its unlocked.

Already and I’m good to go and the only time you have to put in your password is usually when you reboot it then you left up putting your password by typing now you have some keys at the top you have your volume controls and screen brightness which they all work like you’d expect you’ve got a way to switch between different apps and just a couple other keys back and then a Google assistant key now this display is ok it’s a 1080p display there is an option for a 4k display but the display looks really good in general for a 1080p display it looks great you can also play 4k YouTube videos on it so if I go to one of my videos here maybe the unboxing of this.

You’ll see here’s the unboxing and then as far as the options go we have 4k so we can switch to that and it’s a touch screen so the display overall will display 4k although you won’t be able to see it so it’s kind of a waste of bandwidth 1080p is the max that you could see so you can stick to that and save some bandwidth if you have limits and things like that now as far as the speakers are concerned if I go back to this they do go nice and loud they don’t sound amazing but let me have you hear them as best you can through my microphone so those aside we’ve got a USB C 2 USB C plug and then we’ve got a pixel book charging block let me open this up here.

Now high volumes it’s not incredible but it does the job pretty well I would say it’s as good as a surface laptop or some of the older generation Mac books but it really doesn’t compare to the new MacBook’s or the brand new surface laptops and things like that it’s a little bit tinny on the high end its maybe a generation behind as far as the speakers go but they’re fine for most things and then of course you’ve got that headphone adapter or you could use Bluetooth headsets or pixel buds or whatever you’d like with it now specs wise the pixel book go is great there’s some really high-end specs that just don’t make sense to me core i7s with 16 gigs of RAM I can’t imagine anyone’s getting this to do serious video editing or anything like that and this is the core i5 model and this is probably the one I’d recommend.

But it runs plenty fast if I open a Chrome open YouTube open the Play Store we can open a document whatever you want to do its pretty quick at doing that and you’ll see we have those tabs open here and there’s not really any slowdowns I’ve seen I like that we can just scroll through using our finger from time to time we’ve got that nice touch screen and it keeps up well when you’re doing whatever you’re doing you want to use pocket casts you can do it and I have that installed but if you want to listen to podcasts on here it’s the full Android experience but also you’ve got a full desktop browser along with it so that’s something I really like with this device and I think if that’s all you want to do with it that’s fine and then when it comes to battery life I can get through pretty much a workday on this. 

I’ve charged it a few different times over the past couple of weeks and it seems to get ok battery life so let’s see if we can go into this here now in the battery you’ll see were at 66% battery with 2 hours and 44 minutes left now some people are saying 12 to 13 hours of battery life I would say 10 is normal if you’re doing average tasks watching YouTube or things like that maybe a little bit less I honestly have had good enough battery where I haven’t paid too much attention to it because it just seems to work and get out of the way and then when I’m done using it I plug it in and I don’t think about it so it works really well that way and it’s great to use for managing your email or managing a YouTube account or writing documents on if you’re a chrome heavy workplace this is great for you if you’re very heavy into Microsoft Word and things those are options but I don’t know that you’d really want to use this for that there are other options from Microsoft for that so word. 

For example is on here and you’ll see how fast this is its very fast and fluid we can open Word but it’s the smaller version of words so it’s not really a tablet version it be better to use it through a browser and that’s some of the compromises you have with a pixel book or a Chrome book because this is basically an Android phone on a larger scale so you’ve got a bigger display with all the Android features you want with a much more powerful processor desktop processor so you’ve got that core i5 in here eight gigs of ram and a bigger battery so it’s a great experience as far as Android is concerned and super portable in light but anything else beside that if you want to do serious work with it other than documents which that is serious work if you’re writing documents but video editing photo editing you can do the light version of that that you get on the Android phone experience. 

So you can do that on your pixel transfer it over to your pixel book go then come back to your phone and that’s what it’s really meant for its a companion to that and I think it works well for all of those things the only negative I really have about this device is maybe the price for what you’re getting its actually not unreasonable around six to seven hundred dollars depending on when you buy it with this particular configuration that’s a very fair price I think for the capability of it but some people may find it on the high side when it comes to laptops or pixel books so this is more of a premium pixel book but not quite as premium as the previous pixel book with the different the different material colors and things like that.

But this is just as capable as those so you just don’t have some of the features where it flips around the whole screen 180 degrees this one is a little bit different so I really like this device.