Google Pixel

Wired reports: [edited]

The Pixel, a new Chromebook built and designed by Google is a Chromebook unlike any other — premium hardware, high performance and a high-resolution touchscreen display.

It won’t come cheap. Pricing starts at $1,300 (£1049) for a Wi-Fi-only version. Google is making the Pixel available for pre-order Thursday, and it will ship the first week in April.

With that charge in mind, the Pixel introduces some new ideas, and a few older ones too. The exterior design is impressive: an austere rectangular block of aluminum with subtly rounded edges. The black, inset, squared keys bring Apple MacBooks to mind. The implementation of a touch display can’t be found on Apple laptops yet, but it’s increasingly common on newer Windows 8 machines.

The touchscreen ditches the 16:9 aspect ratio found on most laptops in favor of a 3:2 display that’s more friendly to web browsing.

The touchscreen measures 13 inches and rocks a density of 239 pixels per inch, which results in a resolution of 2560 x 1700 pixels for a total of 4.3 million pixels. The screen is gorgeous.

Powering all this is an Intel Core i5 CPU with integrated graphics (scrolling on webpages is very smooth) and it has some on-board storage in the form of a solid-state drive — 32GB for the Wi-Fi model. Google is throwing in 1TB of free Google Drive storage space for three years. Pichai said three years is roughly the expected lifetime of the device. Battery life on the Pixel will come in at about five hours.
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