Ditch your personal computer if you’re willing to suffer a little

Plenty of people do all their Facebooking, YouTubing, Web surfing and whatnot on mobile devices. But not everyone. Lots of us still rely on personal computers for plenty of tasks. Take writers, for instance, for whom a physical keyboard is often a must.

But the tech industry keeps trying to come up with lighter and cheaper alternatives to the traditional laptop. New gadgets from Apple, Microsoft and Google all harbor such ambitions, to varying degrees. Google’s Pixel C tablet came out Tuesday. All have their shortcomings, though they offer some surprises as well.

Microsoft’s Surface tablets aren’t part of this review, basically because including them would be cheating. Surfaces are full-fledged PCs already; they just feature magnetically attached keyboard covers in place of a built-in keyboard. Here, I was more interested in devices that weren’t originally designed as PCs.

In fact, I avoided PCs for a full week to test out these alternatives.

IPAD PRO I started with a bus ride from New York to Philadelphia. The seat had little legroom, yet Apple’s iPad Pro ($799 and up) felt comfortable on my lap, perched on a physical-keyboard cover ($169) that folds into a kickstand.

The tablet ran Microsoft Word for writing and Excel for spreadsheets. All iPads now let you run apps side by side, something you can really only appreciate with the Pro’s 12.9-inch screen. But it’s still not possible to open multiple Word or Excel documents at once. To copy text from one to another, you still have to close the first document and open the second. Adobe’s Lightroom worked fine for basic photo editing, and the resulting images seemed more vivid on the iPad than on my years-old Mac laptop. But I needed the Mac to get the photos off my camera’s memory card in the first place, as the iPad doesn’t have an SD card slot.

Then came the reality check. On the Mac, I organize documents by folder to keep them straight. On the iPad, my options were limited to storing them in the iPad’s photo gallery or emailing copies to myself. The iPad is meant to keep things simple. There’s no messy folder system, and iPad apps are often limited to a subset of the features you can find on PCs.

But work and life can be complex, and you sometimes need a device that can mirror that complexity. The Pro is a good supplement, but it’s no laptop replacement.

PIXEL C Google’s Pixel C tablet ($499 and up) has many laptop characteristics, including a high-resolution screen and a keyboard ($149) that attaches securely to the screen. You can hold the unit by either the tablet or the keyboard half - even upside down. The magnet is very strong, unlike that of Microsoft’s Surface. The screen angle is also adjustable, unlike the iPad Pro. Multiple people can share the Android-based Pixel; it’s possible to set up individual profiles and save settings, unlike the iPad. But the Pixel can’t display apps side-by-side, which makes copying text between apps tougher.